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Resources for assessing the home language competences of migrant pupils

Introduction
Why assess?
What are the principles of assessment?
Whose competences
to assess,
and how?
By
which means
 to assess?
How to get involved?
This page will be available in English soon. Please refer to the pages in French.

Advice on choosing topics and suggested methods for plurilingual assessment

Linking individual and social aspects

When home language assessment is done either to assess levels of competences or for formative information gathering purposes, it is necessary to link individual and social factors (Cenoz, 2013). This involves taking account of the individual's social and cultural background, language repertoire, schooling and the context in which the assessment is taking place. This means gathering and combining information from several sources (interviews, questionnaires, tests, exchanges with families, etc.) in order to produce test results which are based on real and diverse uses and experiences of language.

Combining assessment methods

The choice can be varied and can also combine means of formative and summative assessment, for example an interview and a written test during a diagnostic assessment of a newly arrived learner. Marking can be carried out by bi- or plurilingual assessors, and the result of the assessment can be compared with information about the learner's linguistic and social context (environment) (de Angelis, 2021).

Choosing topics

The choice of topics for level tests needs to be adapted to the themes, contexts, languages and diversity of languages and take account of learners’ different language and cultural backgrounds. Topics that may be sensitive for learners (e.g. war, violence, sexuality, etc.) should be avoided.

Generally speaking, language tasks should be geared towards learners’ everyday life - authentic texts ensuring a link between cultural, sociolinguistic and linguistic aspects of the language task are preferable. Literary texts (children's albums, poetry, etc.) enable more complex subjects to be tackled and may introduce themes that are universal in different societies (coming-of-age rituals, friendship, etc.). These can be  levers for fostering learners’ creativity.

Other essential advice when assessing home language competences is to consider the ethnolinguistic and intercultural dimensions of texts and tasks to be used, and to take account of learners’ interests as well as their ages and CEFR proficiency levels.

Assessing competences in the home language (the language woven into everyday life), means assessing heterogeneous language competences: the level of oral competences may differ from the level of written competences, especially if the learner has never been taught the language.

Here, specific criteria need to be considered, depending on the nature of the assessment and its objectives:

What is the main focus:

  • the language component,
  • or the intercultural component,
  • or mediation,
  • or a combination of these?
  • And so on.

Some examples of assessment situations and objectives, and related criteria.

As a general rule, assessments are organised in the form of individual tests. The functional communicative competences to be assessed are described in advance in a framework of the following:
  • oral and written comprehension,
  • reading,
  • mediation,
  • writing.

The topics and content of all the elements of the test are based on a reference framework (which may be the CEFR) and take account of the context of the learners' experiences.

The assessment of home languages should be based on learners’ own uses of the language and the way in which the language of origin is used (e.g. for work or study abroad, daily communication in the family, etc.). This will ensure that learners are able to draw on prior knowledge of a subject, which is very useful for activating competences linked to the written word and to school subjects.

A bilingual or plurilingual approach should be used in the design of the assessment (examples are given in the section "How can we assess?") and in the administration of the test. For example, the materials may contain parts which are in the home language, with a translation into the language of schooling, or vice versa; the answers to a reading comprehension test may be given in a different language variety or in a different language from that of the text used in the test (in this case, the aim is not production but comprehension of the target language); and so on.

The assessment may include a written and/or an oral part, depending on the learners’ habitual uses of the language.

  • If the learner uses the language orally (everyday usage, family groups, when languages are unwritten, vernacular languages, etc.), the planned assessment will not focus on writing competences, etc.

Generally speaking, in written language, multimodal reading and the use of different sensory channels are recommended: images, photos, computer graphics and other media that stimulate the memory may facilitate access to meaning, particularly at elementary level.

Two examples

In a reading comprehension test of classical Arabic acquired during previous schooling, a response in an Arabic dialect is allowed; the cohesion and relevance of the response in a dialect is an indication of comprehension of the text in classical Arabic. This example applies to other languages where varieties differ from one region to another (Portuguese in particular). The idea is to use the languages in the learner’s repertoire.

In a test of oral or written production, words or expressions from a language other than the target language may be used, sometimes without the learner realising it, because code-switching is characteristic of a plurilingual language user.