Abstract
Abstract Since 2012 an interdisciplinary and culturally heterogeneous team composed of more than 30 people has been engaged in the complex process of conceiving, designing and validating an online placement test with formative orientation called SELF (Système d’Evaluation en Langues à visée Formative), developed and already deployed in six different languages – Italian and English as pilots, followed by French, Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish. Its results are used to form groups and classes of similar ability, or to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in three macro skills (listening, reading, limited writing). In this report, we describe the steps the multilingual team is currently taking to transform SELF into a diagnostic test that will fulfill its original formative purpose and provide students and other stakeholders with more precise information about their performance. This can be done in two ways, by using the data automatically recorded by the online administration platform more thoroughly and by enriching user feedback with clear and informative graphics. This will enhance the validity of our test, and help close the gap between testing and learning.
Highlights
Since 2012 an interdisciplinary and culturally heterogeneous team composed of more than 30 people has been engaged in the complex process of conceiving, designing and validating an online placement test with formative orientation called SELF (Système d’Evaluation en Langues à visée Formative), developed and already deployed in six different languages – Italian and English as pilots, followed by French, Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish
In 2012, a multilingual team started working on SELF, a placement test that would be available in several languages, and open to students from partner universities in France and abroad
We have described the steps the multilingual team is currently taking to transform SELF into a more thorough diagnostic test that will fulfill its original formative purpose and provide students and other stakeholders with more precise information about their performance
Summary
At Université Grenoble Alpes (France), courses in more than 20 foreign languages are on offer, in different modalities: face-to-face, blended or entirely through distance learning, and in semester-, year-long or intensive formats. SELF uses an item bank where each item is tagged by (among others) language, macro skill/language activity (listening, reading or writing), language focus (morphosyntax, lexis, pragmatics etc.), discourse type, observed difficulty during pretesting, and CEFR level, determined by a standard setting procedure with a panel of experts Its goal is to help students realize where their strengths and weaknesses lie by giving them more precise feedback than just the group they should be placed in, in order to enable them to work, if desired, on their weak points and improve their foreign language skills This feedback can be called diagnostic since “diagnostic tests seek to identify those areas in which a student needs further help. The following will provide an account of the steps that are currently being taken to optimize user feedback in these areas
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