Inventory of Foreign Language Teaching and Assessment Practices in Dutch Secondary Schools. Insight into the degree of alignment between learning objectives, didactics and assessment.

Description

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is a construct that aims to promote the development of communicative skills (speaking, writing, reading and listening) in realistic situations. Even though FL teachers agree that the CLT is the most effective foreign language (FL) teaching pedagogy, many of them fail to integrate it in their classrooms (Kissau et al., 2015). In the Netherlands, teachers often use tests that come with widely used textbooks, and are mostly using them to assess vocabulary, grammar and receptive skills (reading and listening). Productive skills (speaking and writing) are to a lesser extent tested and not often in a communicative way, e.g. by translating sentences or reading texts out loud. Such tests barely introduce real-life unpredictability in the form of unknown or unprepared questions and fail to test the ability to adapt FL knowledge and skills to new situations. This creates a lack of constructive alignment between learning goals, teaching approaches and testing.
This design-based research project aims to develop and implement communicative tests in line with CLT goals, in the setting of a professional learning community consisting of 20 FL teachers from 10 participating Dutch secondary schools. It hypothesizes that a structural implementation of these tests, might incite teachers to change their grammar focused pedagogical approach to a more communicative one, with more use of the target language, authentic documents and realistic tasks.

In this poster, the inventory phase of the project, based on survey data, interviews, classroom observations, and analyses of tests and materials, will be presented. Design principles for the professional learning community will be discussed.


Reference:
Kissau, S., Rodgers, M., Haudeck, H. (2015) Practicing what they preach ? A comparison of teacher candidate beliefs and practices. International journal of language studies, 9(4),. 29-54.

Period	10 Aug 2019
Held at	Junior Researchers of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI), Germany
Degree of Recognition	International