Foreign Language Proficiency in Higher Education

314 Pages·2019·4.643 MB·

by  Paula Winke, Susan M. Gass

Educational Linguistics
Paula Winke
Susan M. Gass Editors
Foreign
Language
Profi ciency in
Higher Education
Educational Linguistics
Volume 37
Series Editor
Francis M. Hult, Lund University, Sweden
Editorial Board
Marilda C. Cavalcanti, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Angela Creese, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Ingrid Gogolin, Universität Hamburg, Germany
Christine Hélot, Université de Strasbourg, France
Hilary Janks, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A
Constant Leung, King’s College London, United Kingdom
Angel Lin, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
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Paula Winke • Susan M. Gass
Editors
Foreign Language
Proficiency in Higher
Education
Editors
Paula Winke Susan M. Gass
Second Language Studies Program Second Language Studies Program
Michigan State University Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, USA East Lansing, MI, USA
ISSN 1572-0292 ISSN 2215-1656 (electronic)
Educational Linguistics
ISBN 978-3-030-01005-8 ISBN 978-3-030-01006-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01006-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961737
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Contents
Part I Preliminaries
Proficiency Testing in the U.S. Context: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Susan M. Gass and Paula Winke
The Power of Performance-Based Assessment:
Languages As a Model for the Liberal Arts Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Benjamin Rifkin
Part II Curriculum
Vocabulary Size, Reading Proficiency and Curricular Design:
The Case of College Chinese, Russian and Spanish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Jane F. Hacking, Fernando Rubio, and Erwin Tschirner
Picking Up the PACE: Proficiency Assessment
for Curricular Enhancement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Dan Soneson and Elaine E. Tarone
Assessment and Curriculum for Heritage Language Learners:
Exploring Russian Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Olga Kagan and Anna Kudyma
Modern-Day Foreign Language Majors: Their Goals, Attainment,
and Fit Within a Twenty-First Century Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Paula Winke, Susan M. Gass, and Emily S. Heidrich
Part III Assessments and Learning Outcomes
In Advanced L2 Reading Proficiency Assessments,
Should the Question Language Be in the L1 or the L2?:
Does It Make a Difference? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Troy L. Cox, Jennifer Bown, and Teresa R. Bell
v
vi Contents
Proficiency vs. Performance: What Do the Tests Show? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Fernando Rubio and Jane F. Hacking
Exploring the Relationship Between Self- Assessments
and OPIc Ratings of Oral Proficiency in French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Magda Tigchelaar
Where Am I? Where Am I Going, and How Do I Get There?:
Increasing Learner Agency Through Large-Scale Self Assessment
in Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Gabriela Sweet, Sara Mack, and Anna Olivero-Agney
Arabic Proficiency Improvement Through a Culture of Assessment . . . . . . 197
Katrien Vanpee and Dan Soneson
A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Skill Perspective
on L2 Development in Study Abroad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Dan E. Davidson and Jane Robin Shaw
Part IV I nstructors and Learners
Language Instructors Learning Together: Using Lesson Study
in Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Beth Dillard
U.S. Foreign Language Student Digital Literacy Habits:
Factors Affecting Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Jeffrey Maloney
Linking Proficiency Test Scores to Classroom Instruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Charlene Polio
Afterword and Next Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Margaret E. Malone
Part I
Preliminaries
Proficiency Testing in the U.S. Context:
An Introduction
Susan M. Gass and Paula Winke
Abstract The introductory chapter introduces the readers to The Language
Flagship Proficiency Initiative in which institutions were charged with institutional-
izing proficiency assessment practices that align student placement with course
goals, document ways in which assessement results are integrated into foreign lan-
guage programs, and share practices within the broader foreign language commu-
nity. The chapter provides background on this project and summarizes the contents
of the 14 chapters in the book.
Keywords Proficiency Testing · The Language Flagship · Assessment · ACTFL ·
Foreign Language Curriculum · Instructors · Second Language Learners ·
Speaking · Listening · Reading
In 2014, Michigan State University, along with the Universities of Minnesota and
Utah, were awarded grants through The Language Flagship Proficiency Initiative to
conduct foreign language proficiency assessments on their college campuses. The
initiative was funded by the National Security Education Program (NSEP), a part of
the Department of Defense. (Note that in 2012, NSEP merged with the Defense
Language Office to form the Defense Language and National Security Education
Office, otherwise known as DLNSEO). The grant program is under the umbrella of
the Language Flagship program, and is intended to “integrate Flagship proficiency
assessment practices and processes within existing high quality academic language
programs. The purpose of this initiative is to introduce the Flagship proficiency
assessment process to established academic foreign language programs to measure
teaching and learning, and to evaluate the impact of such testing practices on teach-
ing and learning” (p. 1, Request for Proposals, The Language Proficiency Flagship
Initiative).
The Language Flagship programs were established in 2000 with the express goal
of creating programs that would move students to advanced language proficiency in
S. M. Gass (*) · P. Winke
Second Language Studies Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 3
P. Winke, S. M. Gass (eds.), Foreign Language Proficiency in Higher Education,
Educational Linguistics 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01006-5_1
4 S. M. Gass and P. Winke
a select number of critical languages. Initially, the program served the graduate stu-
dent population, but in 2006 moved toward a model of creating global professionals
with high levels of proficiency, that is, Advanced or higher on the American Councils
on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL) proficiency scale (ACTFL, 2012),
which is equivalent in many respects to a level 3 proficiency level on the Interagency
Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale (http://www.govtilr.org). From their
website (www.thelanguageflagship.org, retrieved 9/18/18) comes the following:
“The Language Flagship graduates students who will take their place among the next
generation of global professionals, commanding a superior level of proficiency in
one of ten languages critical to U.S. national security and economic competitive-
ness.” Assessment is, of course, an important part of any language program as a way
of understanding curricular needs and of determining successes and shortcomings of
language programs in meeting their goals (cf. Bernhardt, 2008, 2014).
It was against this backdrop that the Language Flagship Program issued a call for
institutions of higher education to partner with the Defense Language and National
Security Education Office (DLNSEO) “to create a viable process to assess profi-
ciency learning in high quality, well-established academic language programs and
to document the impact of introducing rigorous proficiency assessment on language
pedagogy practice and outcomes” (p. 3, Request for Proposals, The Language
Proficiency Flagship Initiative). For a broader understanding of the Language
Flagship program, the interested reader is referred to Murphy and Evans-Romaine
(2017), and for a more complete discussion of the history of the Flagship Program
and its contextualization into issues related to foreign language instruction more
generally, see Nugent and Slater (2017). Prior to 2014 the Language Flagship pro-
grams had already had significant involvement with assessment and archived robust
proficiency data from overseas study (see, in particular, Davidson, Garas, & Lekic,
2017). The data from Michigan State University and the Universities of Minnesota
and Utah add to the already existing data from Flagship programs.
Our mandates for this project were the following:
• Institutionalize proficiency assessment practices that align student placement
with course goals;
• Document ways in which assessment results are integrated into foreign language
programs (curriculum and teaching);
• Share practices with others in the foreign language community.
This book is an attempt to provide information about assessment practices and
results from the three universities to whom funding was provided. We have expanded
the scope to include experiences and reports from other institutions in order to pro-
vide as broad a range of efforts to document language proficiency experiences and
practices as possible.
The three universities that are part of the original grant project have approached
their assessments in different ways and with different languages. Despite the indi-
vidual directions and research reports, they have worked collaboratively to create
common questions on a background questionnaire (given to all test takers at all
three universities) and to combine results from their testing of speaking, listening,
and reading into a large anonymized database so as to begin the process of creating