Assessing Content and Language
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ASSESSING CONTENT AND LANGUAGE
INTRODUCTION
A salient feature of the assessment of content knowledge in the context of L2 acquisition and use is that many fundamental aspects await specification by educational practitioners and assessment specialists. Several factors contribute to the late-comer status of content assessment in L2 assessment practice. First, the L2 profession has a long history of describing learners’ L2 knowledge in terms of formal features, independent of and separate from knowing a content area. Second, knowing a foreign or second language was typically modeled as a cognitive ability on the part of the individual learner that emphasized processing of sentence-level morpho-syntactic rules and retrieval of lexical knowledge from memory. The kind of discourse or textual environment necessary for handling sophisticated content could not be readily accommodated within such a focus. Third, while communicative language teaching foregrounded language use over knowledge of language forms and conceptualized that use in terms of communicative tasks, even the most elaborated assessment framework, that by Bachman and Palmer (1996), upheld the separation of language knowledge from topical or content knowledge and highlighted the role of strategic competence and affective factors in performance. As a result, even performance tests, the hallmark of the communicative era, focus on aspects of language rather than task performance in a deeper sense, where quality performance of a task would require content knowledge (see McNamara’s, 1996 discussion of this issue, pp. 45–46). Finally, even the assessment of writing, with its obvious connection to issues of content, has largely confined itself to exploring textual organization, coherence, and cohesion, and the nature of an academic lexicon, rather than addressing how particular language choices themselves contribute to content being communicated more or less successfully. However, most recently, the need to assess content knowledge in relation to language knowledge has become a pressing issue due to increasing individual and societal multilingualism, demands for integrating L2 learners into existing mainstream curricula with diverse content expectations, the call for proof of the attainment of learning goals made by the outcomes assessment movement, and, last but not least, the use of a second language in diverse professional contexts that E. Shohamy and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 7: Language Testing and Assessment, 37–52. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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characterizes globalization, in short, the demands for fostering the development of L2 literacy and, by extension, of assessing it. As a result, the following general questions arise: What exactly is the nature of the content-language link? What kinds of theoretical frameworks are available for imagining and specifying it with an eye to the effects of learner age and level of L2 development? To what extent does education itself he
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