Assessing ELF in European Universities: the Challenges ahead

Assessing ELF in European universities: the challenges ahead The past decade has seen a number of calls to attempt to test English as a Lingua France, but there has been a dearth of research in response, in higher education as elsewhere. This chapter looks at an attempt to redress the balance, in ongoing research at the University of Ca’ Foscari Venice. It reports on the development of an on-line receptive skills test with an ELF element, created in response to a needs analysis carried out among students from a range of academic disciplines, and suggests that such a test is unproblematic conceptually, and realistic in terms of students’ perceptions of needs. More problematic is the assessment of the productive skills. In the second part of the chapter tentative proposals are made about the form a productive skills test in ELF in an academic context might take – in particular, a test of speaking skills which would be appropriate for English Taught Programmes (ETPs). The CEFR conveniently distinguishes between spoken production and spoken interaction, both of which have a role to play in academic contexts (and therefore assessment). For the former, proposals are made about the use of student presentations, which have become a standard feature of continuous assessment in ETPs at MA level. The tentative proposals then put forward to incorporate spoken interaction into a putative test of ELF speaking skills are informed by a classification of speaking strategies, such as accommodation and code-switching, drawn up as part of a year-long study at the Venice International University, an English language humanities faculty in Venice. These clearly show that in the co-construction of meaning which is at the heart of the communicative event the role of the interlocutor is vital; but in a test of ELF interaction so too is the role of the examiner, who is called to be part of this co-construction. In an ELF exam, the examiner thus needs to be part of the ELF context, and not simply a detached observer ticking a checklist of formal features.