Inclusive and fair assessment in foreign language education: The role of fundamental attribution error in the evaluation of students’ performance

Abstract

The main goal of institutionalized foreign language (FL) education is the development of communicative competence (e.g. Council of Europe, 2001), a construct which is multifaceted enough to display considerable individual differences between learners. Substantial research efforts have gone into the investigation of profiles of ‘good language learners’, who experience higher levels of success at foreign language learning (e.g. Nunan, 1995) in comparison with learners classified as ‘low-achieving’ or ‘poor’ (e.g. Ganschow & Sparks, 1995). Yet, such categorization of learners stands in opposition to the principles of inclusion in general and in this context of inclusive education, which calls for educational systems that acknowledge and accommodate all learners and their diversity (Clough & Corbett, 2000). It carries the risk of over-attribution of observable ‘low-achieving’ behavior (e.g. ‘does not keep a conversation going’) to dispositional traits (e.g. ‘is a poor leaner’), rather than to external factors (e.g. ‘does not like the task’), which is one of the most commonly documented biases in social perception research, called the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977).In this paper we demonstrate that pre-service teachers of the subject English as well as of the subject inclusive pedagogy are prone to Fundamental Attribution Error in their evaluation of learners. Exhibiting such bias in the evaluation of learners is problematic as it questions the very fairness, objectiveness, and sustainability of inclusive assessment.