Developing CLIL language assessment tasks
How should assessment tasks in the CLIL classroom differ from those in the traditional language classroom? Ricardo Luceño Bermejo suggests five tasks to assess both reading and writing skills.
Traditional testing methods used in the language classroom to assess reading and writing skills tend to revolve around the simple (and fairly mechanical) transfer of language from text to activity. This naturally limits the range of skills we can test, resulting in a less clear picture of our pupils’ progress. With this in mind I decided to try and devise a formal progress test that assesses reading and writing at 3rd cycle level.
One of the main objectives of the test is to assess pupils’ ability to understand and work with the concepts which lie behind the language. The problem with the traditional question-answer format is that the questions invariably pre-empt the language and structures that the pupils are required to produce in the answer. Let’s look at the first paragraph of our reading text as an example:
Now let’s look at the following questions: What is a baby dolphin called? How many centimetres long is a dolphin at birth? How long do dolphins live? What is the name for a group of dolphins? These are probably the kinds of question that would appear in many reading assessment tasks. But do they really test pupils’ comprehension of the text and its contents? I would argue that at least two questions here could be answered by someone with very little knowledge of English. For example, the question How many centimetres long is a dolphin at birth? already contains most of the language found in the sentence which carries the answer: At birth a dolphin calf is about 90-130cm long.
Activity 1: Using tables
By using a table format to elicit information, we are testing pupils’ grasp of both the language and concepts more effectively. The table format focuses on key concepts while avoiding too much repetition of key language. Look at the following example:
The categories on the left are language items which do not appear in the text, although we will need to check that our pupils are all familiar with this language. Thus a wider set of study skills is required; pupils need to decode and categorise the information, which requires a deeper understanding of the text and its content.
Activity 2: Using a mind map
The following activity consists of a mind map, the purpose of which again is to identify (implicitly) how the information in the text is organised and thus allow pupils to extract the key concepts and language.
While Activity 1 (the table) gave the pupils the categories, Activity 2 goes a step further and asks them to organise and decide for themselves which tasks are important. Here, I took the map itself as the starting point as it will condition the way that pupils approach the text, ie in this case looking out for ways to categorise dolphins (warm-blooded, pods, sociable, can live up to 40 years, etc.). For this reason the instruction is Look at the mind map, then read the text to complete it rather than Read the text and complete the mind map. Naturally this is a skill which pupils need to have practised at various stages during the course.
Activity 3: Applying wider knowledge
This activity requires pupils to use a greater degree of cognitive analysis, encouraging them to relate the concepts in the text to their wider knowledge of the subject. The idea behind this activity is that it is not a memory exercise; memory testing often comes at the expense of other skills. However, if you allow pupils access to reference materials (or their own notes) during an assessment task, the thinking processes involved are often more complex and challenging, with the need to demonstrate understanding of both language and concepts.
Activity 4: Defining words in context
This is a definition activity and requires pupils to contextualise given vocabulary from the reading text. Again, a deeper understanding of the content is being assessed. It is useful to give pupils a scaffolded format to follow, through which they can demonstrate this understanding.
Activity 5: Using a text to help you write
When setting writing assessment tasks, it’s a good idea to train pupils to look at the reading text as a model for this. They will be able to draw on both the language and any thought processes they used prior to the writing task to decode and categorise the information in the reading part.
In CLIL assessments we need to make sure that pupils’ grasp of language is sufficient for the content area to be understood and reflected in the assessment task. This means designing tasks that draw on higher level thinking skills which force pupils to analyse rather than simply repeat information. No assessment procedure is ever perfect, but the more we can design our tasks to reflect real language use, the more successfully we can gauge our pupils’ understanding of the content topics.
Ricardo Luceño Bermejo is a teacher and teacher trainer. He teaches in Castro Urdiales (Cantabria), where he is also the Bilingual Project and European Language Portfolio (ELP) coordinator.
If you would like to download Ricardo’s worksheet in its entirety, click here.
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