The MLA's Articulation Initiative:
High School to College in Foreign Language Programs

Assessment
Elizabeth Bernhardt, Stanford University

What is important about assessment is its appropriateness, meaningfulness, and usefulness for making particular judgments. For articulation, we need to make judgments about where students are linguistically and culturally and where they need to be to meet the standards of the institutions that they move between. Fundamentally, then, our job is to worry about whether the tools we use to make those judgments are indeed appropriate, meaningful, and useful. We also need to answer the question To whom? Our assessments need to be appropriate, meaningful, and useful to us, to our institutions, and to our students.

Appropriate assessment means assessment that reflects what we know about the abilities that we are trying to assess. We know, for example, that second language learning is developmental; that is, that certain forms appear before others and that instructional sequences do not necessarily change the order of the appearance of these forms. We also know that comprehension-based language skills (reading and listening particularly in cognate languages) evoke higher performances than other skills within the same amount of instructional time. These findings and others have particular implications for the assessment schemes that we use.

Meaningfulness refers to assessment that actually reflects the skills it is targeting and communicates those reflections in a way that practitioners and students understand. Assessments that generate a score and provide no other information about the interpretation of that score are meaningless to teachers and students. Granted, such scores help us understand at an abstract level who is better than whom or which school is better than which school. But at the program level or at the individual level a score does not tell a student how well he or she can speak or pronounce, use a contemporary vocabulary, hold the floor for an extended period, or write an essay.

Usefulness refers to assessment that is convenient and that allows users to make practical judgments. At some level, a set of scores is extremely useful because it enables a dispassionate set of decisions. But we know from long experience that those kinds of judgments are frequently inappropriate (that is, we know that the grammar score does not equate with a functional ability to use the language) and most of the time not very meaningful. The assessments that we use and develop must enable us to make good decisions in a reasonable amount of time.

In the real world of schools and colleges, assessment will be a compromise.
Clearly, we need to assess for abilities in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural interpretation. We need to do so in a framework that reflects the types of institutions that we populate and the maturity and intellectual development of the students we service. In the final analysis, we must ensure that the assessment compromise we strike has a maximum amount of research-based knowledge and a high degree of integrity.

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