Assessing students in bilingual education programmes: The interplay between cognitive and linguistic demands

Abstract

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become increasingly popular in bilingual and multilingual contexts, and particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) regions such as Europe and Asia. One of the underlying objectives of CLIL is to allow students to simultaneously learn both content and the second language (L2), since it is asserted that content subjects provide authentic communicative contexts for L2 acquisition. Such a two-fold goal, however, has not been adequately addressed in terms of assessment, where EFL learners are inevitably assessed of their English knowledge in conjunction with their content knowledge. This study seeks to fill in this research gap by examining the interplay of cognitive and linguistic demands in CLIL assessments. Adapting the framework of analysing CLIL assessment proposed by Lo and Lin (2014), all the questions in the Biology and Geography papers in a high-stakes public examination in Hong Kong between 2012 and 2015 were analysed. It was found that the questions in both subjects predominantly necessitated the cognitive processes of ‘application’ and ‘analysis’ through the production of sentences and texts. At the same time, some significant differences between the two subjects were observed. While the Biology papers involved more application of knowledge at the sentence level, the Geography papers required more higher-order, analytical thinking processes through the production of texts, indicating that the latter were more demanding both cognitively and linguistically. It was argued that the disproportionately distributed marks across different cognitive and linguistic demands in the two papers, though to a different extent, might not be able to aptly diagnose students’ subject content and English knowledge. Implications will be drawn with special reference to scrutinising the validity of CLIL assessment. In light of how assessment might exert washback effect on teaching and learning, pedagogical implications for CLIL will also be discussed.