Linguistic Audit in an International Context

What did the EALTA Conference, “Assessment of What…?” mean to our colleagues in the linguistic audit department? A host of directions for the research and development of linguistic evaluation practices, but also a few personal conclusions or good practices for testing candidates.

3 good practices in Eucom linguistic evaluation

Thorough knowledge of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages;

Gradual increase in difficulty when asking questions during an evaluation, after having created, in the first minutes, a confort zone for both the assessor and the candidate

Constructive feedback offered to the candidate.

A personal lesson

It has been confirmed that the evaluation should have a positive impact: we don’t evaluate what the trainee can’t do, but what s/he can do and, starting with what s/he can do, together we can find ways of improvement.

Starting from the idea that Assessment tasks should stimulate productive learning practices among students, what is the connection between teaching a foreign language and linguistic evaluation?

In the traditional teaching model, the evaluation was considered the last stage, which was closing the teaching-learning cycle. Through evaluation, the teacher obtained the necessary information regarding the results of the learning activity (knowledge, competence, skill, ability, etc.). In this case, the evaluation is considered from an informative angle

However, of late, the concept of Learning Oriented Assessment (LOA) brings forward a change in focus, from the informative to the formative. The word emphasizes the fact that all means of evaluation should effectively contribute to the continuous learning process. The aim of an evaluation is not only to establish a linguistic level for trainees, but to find ways to improve their abilities.

Therefore, the evaluation must have positive impact and it must be based on the idea of partnership, just as the whole foreign language teaching process.