Language Assessment of EMI Content Teachers: What norms

A number of universities have implemented policies for internal assessment of lecturers’ English proficiency to ensure the quality of teaching in EMI programs (Ball & Lindsay, 2013; Dimova & Kling, 2015). Given the complexity of the plurlingual teaching and learning contexts in which these assessments are administered and used, decisions about what English norm lecturers’ performances are assessed against have been a struggle. Selection of appropriate norms can warrant the quality of the assessment instrument and the validity of the procedure, as well as the avoidance of bias (Bachman & Palmer, 2010). Therefore, this presentation discusses the selection of English norm(s) in relation to the validity of the performance-based EAP certification test, Test of Oral English Proficiency for Academic Staff (TOEPAS), which is used for assessing university lecturers’ oral proficiency, providing lecturers with a level score and extensive written and spoken feedback on their language skills. Since references to monolithic native speaker norms tend to be emphasized in such assessments, this chapter discusses how these references affect the rating process and what implications they have for the multilingual context in which they are used. Results from analysis of assessment data and interviews with lecturers suggest that raters have assigned the top proficiency level strictly to native-like performances based on inner-circle norms (Kachru, 1992) even though lecturers teach in a clearly English as a lingua franca context in which linguistic flexibility and adjustment are crucial (Jenkins, 2011). Therefore, the assessment norms misrepresent the teaching context and the lecturers’ role in the plurilingual classroom. This presentation concludes with a discussion about the interplay between language uses, specific purpose content knowledge and teaching skills in regard to its role in assessments and in language training for teaching in the English-medium.