Reassessing CLIL assessment: The integral role of language

Abstract

In bilingual and multilingual contexts where Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is practised, students learn content knowledge and a second language (L2) simultaneously. It follows that both content and language are assessed, although research in this area is scarce. Our study hence adopts a gridded and progressive framework to categorise questions necessitating different cognitive and linguistic demands in CLIL assessments. Having analysed over 2,200 questions in Geography textbooks/workbooks and public examination papers in Hong Kong, we observed that junior secondary assessments were dominated by low-level cognitive (i.e. recall of knowledge) and linguistic (i.e. no production such as multiple-choice questions or word-level production) demands. These ‘recall’ questions which required minimal language production, however, decreased significantly by 35% in senior secondary; in replacement, students were asked more higher-order thinking questions (i.e. application and analysis of knowledge). More specifically, the percentage of these ‘application’ and ‘analysis’ questions involving sentence or even text production amounted to 40%, which was contrastingly higher than the 10% in junior assessments. These findings question the sufficiency of existing practices in preparing students for transition from lower to higher forms, urging the need for teachers to provide students with more language support in CLIL.