Integrated Performance Assessment and KSL

Abstract

This chapter reviews research on Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA), which was designed and initiated at the end of the twentieth century for the purposes of measuring students’ in-class language-performance progress, as well as guiding students to move toward proficiency outcomes. IPA lets learners perform interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational tasks under one theme and receive immediate feedback on each task performance using rubrics that are created based on ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) proficiency and performance descriptions. Previous research on the IPA reports that learners’ performances in different communication modes do not necessarily progress evenly alongside their increasing metacognitive awareness of their own processes of language learning. Crucially, IPA bridges this gap by providing a performance-based assessment that measures learners’ progress in meeting both proficiency and World-Readiness Standards; teachers indicate that IPA has a washback effect on instruction and curricular design. Yet there is little research to report the effectiveness of feedback based on the rubrics, an essential feature of the IPA which guides learners toward the next level of the proficiency scale. Although new research on IPA has recently emerged in the field of Korean as a second language (KSL), this chapter suggests the need for further KSL-specific empirical research. It then discusses the pedagogical implications of research findings, as well as the purposeful design of curricula and assessment in KSL, that foster the attainment of measurable student learning outcomes.