Dynamic Assessment of Narrative Competence

In Developmental Education, language plays an essential role as a tool for communication (and thinking). Learning to produce coherent messages (“narratives”) with both cultural and personal value in the context of meaningful socio-cultural practices is considered as an important goal of Developmental Education. Narratives are essential for human action as they function as a tool for giving meaning to reality. Therefore, close observation and assessment of children’s narratives is essential in the context of Developmental Education. Over the past years we have developed a Dynamic Assessment (DA) instrument for assessing children’s narrative competence. This instrument combines two common approaches to DA, namely standardised interventionist DA and interactionist DA. With the help of this instrument, teachers are able to gain insight into children’s actual narrative competence as well as their developmental potential and their receptivity to certain forms of assistance to reach this potential. Our experience up to now shows that it is possible to assess children’s narrative competence in a valid and reliable manner

Trajectories of language assessment literacy in a teacher-researcher partnership:Locating elements of praxis through narrative inquiry

In 2011, under the auspices of the Luxembourg Ministry of Education, but initiated and steered by a group of teachers, a researcher-teacher partnership was set-up between Lancaster University (UK) and a team of secondary school teachers in Luxembourg. The aim of the partnership was to (a) explore the potential for redesigning the national end-of-secondary-school English exam to ensure alignment with current approaches to language teaching in the classroom, and (b) help to develop the teaching team’s language assessment literacy, and their capacity to carry out high-stakes language test development work. The partnership provides fertile ground for exploring the concept of “praxis” and its relationship to current understandings of language assessment literacy (LAL). This chapter will explore these issues through narrative inquiry; specifically, an analysis of narratives produced by two teachers and two researchers reflecting on their experiences of the project over the past 6 years. Through a discussion of narrative excerpts, we will demonstrate how narrative inquiry can provide evidence of trajectories of language assessment literacy over time, as well as reveal relations between key characters, and identify complicating factors within overarching plots. The chapter will conclude with a reflection on the usefulness of narrative inquiry as a method for exploring a praxis perspective on language assessment literacy

Conceptualising Assessment and Learning in the CLIL Context. An Introduction

Multiple CLIL writers (e.g. Ball et al. 2015) have emphasised the significant role of assessment in promoting learning in CLIL classrooms, where there is a dual focus on learning content and language (Genesee and Hamayan 2016). Because of this dual focus, the assessment process in CLIL becomes more complex. Assessment in CLIL should provide insights into learner content and linguistic knowledge as well as strategies used to learn both content and language in order to identify student progress and needs. This should inform both teachers and students about how to enhance learning. Despite excellent overviews, guidelines, and practical activities in CLIL assessment (Lin 2016; Mehisto and Ting 2017; Quartapelle 2012), teachers express concerns about adopting new assessment practices, principles, and techniques and are underusing the potential to support learning (deLuca and Bellara 2013; Hill 2017a; Tsagari and Vogt 2017).peerReviewe