Understanding and supporting language development through proficiency assessment

Research-based proficiency assessments provide a powerful framework for well-articulated sequences of courses supporting student language development in secondary and postsecondary language programs for both students and instructors. Students and instructors need to be acquainted with the goals of proficiency-based learning and teaching; understand the relationship between the four macro-skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing as well as the roles lexical and morphosyntactic competencies play in their development; know their or their students’ present levels of proficiency; and understand what needs to happen and be done to make progress towards the next higher level in these various areas. This presentation has two goals: (1) Provide baseline data to determine reasonable expectations for four-year undergraduate language programs in a number of languages other than English; and (2) Propose an instruction-assessment framework for ensuring that both students and instructors know their own or their students space in their linguistic development and what to do to progress. The baseline data include data from the Flagship Proficiency Initiative (see the articles in Winke, P. & Gass, S. (2019). Foreign Language Proficiency in Higher Education. Springer.) and additional data to establish links between receptive and productive levels of proficiency and vocabulary size as well as links between hours of instruction and proficiency levels. The instruction-assessment framework will focus on traditional and alternative assessments; the kinds of things students need to know about language proficiency to be able to self-assess and to engage in purposeful learning activities appropriate for their specific levels; the things instructors need to know to plan and manage their students’ learning; and the kinds of teaching interventions that may be most beneficial at various proficiency levels.