In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, non-linguistic content knowledge is taught, learned and assessed in an additional language. Assessment in CLIL is arguably as important as teaching and learning, because CLIL assessment can reveal students' achievements in both content and language and can provide feedback to inform teachers' instruction and students' learning. However, it is challenging to design valid assessment tasks in CLIL, considering the inseparable relationship between content and language. Existing studies of CLIL seem to focus largely on teachers' pedagogical practices, without paying much attention to how they perceive and carry out assessment in CLIL. The current study aims to address this gap. Through conducting individual in-depth interviews with 10 purposefully sampled CLIL teachers in Asian contexts and examining their assessment materials, this study investigates the teachers' perceptions and practices of assessment in CLIL. The findings report teachers' views of the role that language plays in CLIL assessment, such as L2 being as important as content, but posing a challenge to students' comprehension and ideas expression. The findings also highlight some good CLIL assessment practices before, during and after assessment. For example, with regard to assessment task design, teachers incorporated CLIL 4C elements into assessment tasks based on the syllabus and learning objectives, promoted students' various skills development, made assessment tasks interesting and engaging; with regard to assessment implementation, teachers showed attentiveness to students' language use, offered scaffolding to help students perform better in assessment, sought intra- and inter-disciplinary collaboration in CLIL assessment; with regard to assessment result interpretation and action-taking, teachers diagnosed students' strengths and weaknesses (with students) and provided suggestions for students to make improvement. Yet, the findings also reveal some potential issues and challenges regarding CLIL assessment, such as teachers overusing L1 and overlooking the need to support students' language when assessing students' content knowledge, teachers having divergent views with colleagues on how to mark and give feedback due to different beliefs as CLIL teachers. By comparing the perceptions and practices of CLIL teachers with different backgrounds, the findings of this study shed light on how CLIL teachers' assessment knowledge, their identity as CLIL teachers, as well as contextual factors (e.g. students' ability, school policy, exam-oriented culture in the educational context) influence their assessment practices. Insights into what constitutes good CLIL assessment and implications for promoting CLIL teachers' assessment literacy (Lo & Leung, 2022) will also be discussed.
References:
Lo, Y., & Leung, C. (2022). Conceptualising assessment literacy of teachers in Content and Language Integrated Learning programmes. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2022.2085028
