Comparative assessment of young learners' foreign language competence in three Eastern European countries

This paper concerns teacher practices in, and beliefs about, the assessment of young learners' progress in English in three Eastern European countries (Slovenia, Croatia, and the Czech Republic). The central part of the paper focuses on an international project involving empirical research into assessment of young learners' foreign language competence in Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic. With the help of an adapted questionnaire, we collected data from a non-random sample of primary and foreign language teachers who teach foreign languages at the primary level in these countries. The research shows that English as a foreign language is taught mostly by young teachers either primary specialists or foreign language teachers. These teachers most frequently use oral assessment/interviews or self-developed tests. Other more authentic types of assessment, such as language portfolios, are rarely used. The teachers most frequently assess speaking and listening skills, and they use assessment involving vocabulary the most frequently of all. However, there are significant differences in practice among the three countries

An assessment of VMS-rerouting and traffic signal planning with emission objectives in an urban network — A case study for the city of Graz

This paper discusses a case study evaluating the potential impact of ITS traffic management on CO 2 and Black carbon tailpipe emissions. Results are based on extensive microsimulations performed using a calibrated VISSIM model in combination with the AIRE model for calculating the tailpipe emissions from simulated vehicle trajectories. The ITS traffic management options hereby consist of easily implementable actions such as the usage of a variable message sign (VMS) or the setting of fixed time signal plans. Our simulations show that in the current case shifting 5% of vehicles from one route to another one leads to an improvement in terms of emissions only if the VMS is complemented with an adaptation of the signal programs, while the VMS sign or the change of the signal plans alone do not yield benefits. This shows that it is not sufficient to evaluate single actions in a ceteris paribus analysis, but their joint network effects need to be taken into account