Abstract
This study intends to identify the appropriateness of the writing and reading assessment items of the current English syllabus according to the targeted CEFR levels set by the Ministry of Education and to find out English teachers’ familiarity with CEFR writing and reading scales by suggesting suitable CEFR levels for writing and reading assessment items. An assessment checklist was used to collect the data involving 331 secondary school English teachers. Results show that most of the assessment items are found to be suitable and applicable to be used in the CEFR. This study also proves that the teachers were aware of the six levels of CEFR global scale because they were able to identify the suitable CEFR level that matches against CEFR target level set by the Ministry of Education. In conclusion, the Ministry of Education, Malaysia should consider to continue using some part of the current English syllabus and assessment instead of recommending its total abolishment. Keywords: CEFR in Malaysia; Teachers’ judgement; CEFR alignment; School based assessment; applicability
Highlights
The adoption of CEFR onto education system needs to be comprehensive and involves a number of major changes
The results showed that majority of English teachers have poor level of English proficiency which is equivalent to CEFR level B2 (The Sun Daily, 2016)
All the writing and reading assessment items are suitable with a combination of three easy items, six intermediate items and four difficult items
Summary
The adoption of CEFR onto education system needs to be comprehensive and involves a number of major changes. According to Byram, Gribkova and Starkey (2002), the adoption of CEFR should involve changes to several components of the education system which include the syllabus, teaching approach, teaching materials, learning outcomes as well as assessment and evaluation. Calibrating the syllabus with CEFR shall be the first main step in the implementation process. This is important as it checks and ensures the syllabus is carefully mapped and aligned with the six levels of CEFR descriptors before it can be claimed as ‘CEFR aligned English syllabus. A large amount of work has been carried out by testing agencies, language learners and users in their effort to align their language tests to CEFR for over a decade. The collection of work to align language tests against CEFR was compiled and has been turned into a book by Martyniuk (2010) with the aim of highlighting the process of linking a single language test to the CEFR
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