Background and Goals - part 1
The goal of this paper is to evaluate a battery of tests devised to assess the oral proficiency of elementary school children in grades 1 - 4 learning first year oral English.
Although English proficiency tests for adults and teenagers have been developed and elaborated on for the past 60 years and more (B. Spolsky), there have been few if any real attempts to test the achievement of children learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in the lower grades of primary school or in kindergarten. Indeed, Carpenter, Fuji and Kataoka (1995), in their assessment of Japanese oral abilities in children aged 5 - 10 in a Japanese immersion program in the USA, state:
The problem of Japanese assessment is really part of a larger problem relating to the language proficiency assessment of young children in any language. Although current trends in language assessment for adults emphasize more naturalistic procedures for measuring oral proficiency, it has been difficult to adapt interview techniques or rating scales to children.
The discussion of what age to start EFL is not the goal of this paper. However, this subject is closely connected and I will consider it in the light of my findings.
There has been a recent wave of interest in the teaching of EFL to ever-younger children (Bergentoft, 1994). Bergentoft reports that the only two languages accepted today within the Council of Europe are English and French. Bergentoft further reports that one of the reasons for wanting to start English instruction earlier is the young child's willingness to imitate the English heard through the media. Bergentoft reports that many countries are introducing English and other foreign languages through the school system much earlier now in experimental programs - most notably Austria starting in 1st grade.
However, endeavours to teach young children English have not been accompanied by ways of assessing the various programs. For example, my own contacts with teachers teaching with the "Lollipop" program in Austria, have revealed that the program has no assessment system. Some assessment programs exist for immersion programs, but none have been found in the literature for EFL for very beginners in primary school.
Until now, success in EFL has been measured according to the feedback received from children, parents, schools or kindergartens. As long as the children were learning some English and enjoying themselves, nobody seemed particularly concerned about how much the children were picking up. This, you may argue, seems a reasonably good way of measuring the success of a program. Indeed, as pointed out by Spolsky in the introduction to his history of language testing: "The flowering of modern scientific language testing has been one facet of the attempt to measure an aspect of human ability ......... perhaps better left for healthy human skepticism." (Note 1).
- 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
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