Background and Goals - part 2
None-the-less, important language policy decisions need to be made on many different levels:
- at what age to start foreign language instruction
- what programs and methods are best suited for what age
- how to assess the children's achievement
The tests presented in this paper were designed to give the teachers an instrument to be able to follow the progress and needs of all their students during a specific EFL program for children from grades 1 - 4. Indeed, the goal of this paper is to present a model for testing the level of spoken English during the first year of teaching children in grades 1 - 4 of primary school. Although a certain syllabus is used in this paper (every test needs content!) the model can be used with varied syllabuses. Moreover, another outcome of this venture, may to be able to produce computer-generated tests according to a specific syllabus which can be fed into the computer data.
Carpenter, Fuji and Kataoka (1995) discuss the problems they had in finding tests to measure the oral proficiency of their Japanese immersion children aged 5 - 10:
Despite the fact that immersion education has been practiced in Canada since 1965, and transitional bilingual education has been federally mandated in the USA since 1974, there are few instruments to assess the second language oral proficiency of young children in any language.
Bachman (1990) reports on a wide range of oral interviews, elicitation procedures, tasks and situational tests. To the best of my understanding, none of these provide test models or procedures suitable for elementary school children. Shohamy (1985) gives many different types of tasks for eliciting oral production. Picture description is the only task among them that seemed applicable to young children. Other tasks described by her, such as giving instructions, interviewing or being interviewed, reporting information, discussing particular topics in groups or individually, role play, debates, telephone interviews or test-taker interviews were beyond the basic linguistic ability of the young children.
The difference between immersion students aged 5 - 10 with various years of language immersion behind them, and students in the middle of their first year of spoken English on a once a week for 3/4 hour learning is evident. There is a huge difference in the exposure they have to the language. As Spolsky writes in Conditions for Second Language Learning:
Exposure condition (necessary, graded): The more time spent learning any aspect of a second language, the more will be learnt.
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 1
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 2
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 3
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 4
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 5
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 6
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 7
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 8
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 9
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 10
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 11
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 12
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 13
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 14
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 15