Beyond ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’. When learners and theories agree
This paper presents a T&L project which aimed to enhance the process of assessing foreign language skills in a UK HE department, by increasing students’ understanding of rubrics and working with students to redesign them.
Despite limitations, analytic marking schemes based on the idea of language learners as defective users, whose abilities are evaluated against unrealistic ‘standards’, have become widely accepted in HEIs. Rubrics are used to increase the transparency of assessment and help students understand what is expected from them. However, they can foster a wrong view of ‘language’ and ‘language learning’, and be disheartening for learners, as the analysis of three focus group discussions revealed. The discursive patterns that emerged from the discourse analysis framework were related to theories of language development based on a dynamic view of ‘language’ and ‘language learning’ (Kramsch, 2008; Larsen-Freeman, 2014), and new ‘flexible’, ‘minimalist’ rubric templates were designed in partnership with students.
References
Kramsch, C. 2008. Ecological perspectives on foreign language education. Language Teaching 41 (3): 389-408.
Larsen-Freeman, D. 2014. Saying what we mean: Making a case for ‘language acquisition’ to become ‘language development’. Language Teaching 48 (4): 491-505.
Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 