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An account of how children learn L2s in formal contexts and how that knowledge impacts on the design, development, and evaluation of their language assessment products.
This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Language Testing provides an updated and comprehensive account of the area of language testing and assessment. The volume brings together 35 authoritative articles, divided into ten sections, written by 51 leading specialists from around the world. There are five entirely new chapters covering the four skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as a new entry on corpus linguistics and language testing. The remaining 30 chapters have been revised, often extensively, or entirely rewritten with new authorship teams at the helm, reflecting new generations of expertise in the field. With a dedicated section on technology in language testing, reflecting current trends in the field, the Handbook also includes an extended epilogue written by Harding and Fulcher, contemplating what has changed between the first and second editions and charting a trajectory for the field of language testing and assessment. Providing a basis for discussion, project work, and the design of both language tests themselves and related validation research, this Handbook represents an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and practitioners working in language testing and assessment and the wider field of language education.
Educating children and leading them towards the path of bilingualism is a valuable and challenging task for any educator. Effective language teaching can contribute to young learners’ cognitive growth, develop their problem-solving skills, enhance their comprehension abilities, and provide children with the satisfaction of succeeding in the challenge of learning a foreign language. All these issues must be taken under consideration when researching children and their teachers. The current literature indicates that further material is needed to provide professionals with different classroom situations and enhance the art of teaching children. Teaching Practices and Equitable Learning in Children's Language Education focuses on various perspectives of efficient practices, approaches, and ideas for professional development in the field of young language learners. The chapters in this book link the theoretical understanding and practical experience of teaching children languages by concentrating on teaching practices, material design, classroom management, reading, speaking, writing, and more. This book is designed for inservice and preservice teachers, administrators, teacher educators, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the field of early language learning and applied linguistics at large.
This Handbook, with 45 chapters written by the world’s leading scholars in second language acquisition (SLA) and language testing, dives into the important interface between SLA and language testing: shared ground where researchers seek to measure second language performance to better understand how people learn their second languages. The Handbook also reviews how to best measure and evaluate the second language (L2) learners’ personal characteristics, backgrounds, and learning contexts to better understand their L2 learning trajectories. Taking a transdisciplinary approach to research, the book builds upon recent theorizing and measurement principles from the fields of applied linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, psycholinguistics, psychometrics, educational measurement, and social psychology. The Handbook is divided into six key sections: (1) Assessment concepts for SLA researchers, (2) Building instruments for SLA research, (3) Measuring individual differences, (4) Measuring language development, (5) Testing specific populations, and (6) Measurement principles for SLA researchers.
This volume documents international, national, and small-scale testing and assessment projects of English language education for young learners, across a range of educational contexts. It covers three main areas: age-appropriate ‘can do statements’ and task types for teaching and testing learners between the ages of 6 to 13; innovative approaches to self-assessment, diagnostic testing, self- perception, and computer-based testing; and findings on how young learners perform on vocabulary, listening, speaking, pronunciation, and reading comprehension tests in European and Asian contexts. Early language learning has become a major trend in English language education around the globe. As a result of the spread of teaching English to a growing number of young children, assessment of and for learning have emerged as key issues. In line with this development, there is a clear and emerging need to make early language programs accountable and to assess both the progress children make over time and to quantify their achievement at various stages of development. This volume informs stakeholders about the realistic goals of early language learning, their efficiency, and how much progress children make over time.
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, University of Wuppertal, course: Teaching English to very young children, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In 1999, Rea-Dickens and Rixon conducted a survey about the relationship between assessment and learning. 120 European teachers and teacher trainers were asked if the main purpose of their assessment was to help their teaching, and 97% answered in the affirmative. Rea-Dickens and Rixon examined afterwards what the teachers really assessed and how they did so. They found a strong "mismatch between curricular aims, pedagogy and test content" (Cameron, Lynne.Teaching languages to very young learners. Cambridge University press.2001. page 217). The assessment focused mainly on the children's achievements but neglected on other curricular aims such as language and social awareness. The assessment of young learners should serve teaching by providing feedback on the children's learning progress, so that the content and the difficulty of subsequent teaching units can be effectively adjusted to the learners' needs. This paper offers the reader an overview about the theoretical ideas and principles which should be kept in mind when implementing an assessment. Furthermore the guidelines of lower Saxony are introduced. They illustrate the expectations of the German school system towards assessment in class. Afterwards the paper gives an overview about psycholinguistic tests such as "Blitztest" and "F-Test". Additionally, the paper answers the question of origin and purpose of the Cambridge Young Learners Test. Finally, material which should support the teacher in the efficiency assessment of the pupils is represented, considering the example of "Ginger".
Quantitative corpus research on written language development has expanded rapidly in recent years, assisted by the ever-increasing power and accessibility of software capable of reliably analysing huge collections of learner writing. For this work to reach its full potential, it is important that researchers have a strong understanding of its methodological foundations and of the existing empirical evidence base on which it can build. This book provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of research in this area. Covering both first and second language learning contexts, it sets out a coherent theoretical framework and systematically reviews studies published over the last seventy years in order to establish what such research has taught us about written language development, what it hasn't taught us, and what we should do next. Timely and original, this is an essential reference work for academic researchers and students of first and second language writing.
The volume unites research and practice on integrating language learning, teaching and assessment at preschool and early school age. It includes chapters written by experts in the field who have studied some of the very youngest (pre-primary) children through to those up to the age of 12, in a variety of private and state contexts across Europe. The collection makes a much-needed contribution to the subject of appropriate assessment for children with the focus of many chapters being classroom-based assessment, particularly formative assessment, or the case for developing assessment skills in relation to even the youngest children. As a whole, the book provides useful case study insights for policymakers, teacher educators, researchers and postgraduate students with interest in or responsibility for how children are assessed in their language learning. It also provides practical ideas for practitioners who wish to implement greater integration of assessment and learning in their own contexts.
English Language Proficiency Assessments for Young Learners provides both theoretical and empirical information about assessing the English language proficiency of young learners. Using large-scale standardized English language proficiency assessments developed for international or U.S. contexts as concrete examples, this volume illustrates rigorous processes of developing and validating assessments with considerations of young learners’ unique characteristics. In this volume, young learners are defined as school-age children from approximately 5 to 13 years old, learning English as a foreign language (EFL) or a second language (ESL). This volume also discusses innovative ways to assess young learners’ English language abilities based on empirical studies, with each chapter offering stimulating ideas for future research and development work to improve English language assessment practices with young learners. English Language Proficiency Assessments for Young Learners is a useful resource for students, test developers, educators, and researchers in the area of language testing and assessment.
This edited volume documents the state of the art in research into how the age factor interacts with other factors in a variety of educational contexts. The book comprises 17 chapters examining early language learning and teaching in a range of countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Authors discuss main themes in research methodology, curricular and assessment issues, short- and long-term outcomes, the role of individual differences, innovation in teacher education, classroom processes, as well as the impact of the target language. The first two chapters (Nikolov; Edelenbos and Kubanek) overview the main trends in research. Four papers (Curtain;Ofra Inbar-Lourie and Elana Shohamy; Jalkannen; Haenni Hoti, Heinzmann, and Müller) focus on the assessment of young learners; two authors examine how age impacts on language learning over time (Muñoz; Kasai). Individual differences (motivation, anxiety, aptitude, and socio-economic status) are explored byMihaljevi? Djigunovi?, Mattheoudakis and Alexiou, and Kiss. Innovation is the common theme in chapters written by Wang, Moon, and Peng and Zhang. The last three papers analyze the status of languages (Harris, Enever, Carmel). The book is a must have for teacher educators of pre- and in-service teachers of modern languages to young learners, MA and PhD students in TEFL/TESOL and other languages, researchers and policy makers.
