Assessing intercultural language learning Presentation by Joe van Dalen at AFMLTA conference in Sydney 2009

1. ASSESSMENT
OF
INTERCULTURAL
LEARNING
A personal view from a
Research Project participant
AFMLTA Conference, Sydney, July 2009

2. ASSESSMENT
OF
INTERCULTURAL
LEARNING
 Research Centre for Languages & Cultures
at UniSA
 Eight to ten teachers from primary and
secondary schools from across sectors
 Chinese, Italian, French, Spanish, ESL

3. WHAT IS THE
“INTERCULTURAL”?
 Developing awareness and understanding of:
 Linguistic & cultural diversity
 Oneself as a language user & cultural being
 How language & culture affect communication &
relationships
 Our behaviour & attitudes
 Acting and interacting based on:
 Awareness, diversity, engagement, a capacity to
learn, multiple interpretations, reciprocity
 An ethical issue

4. Assessing Intercultural
Understanding
 What is important for our students to learn/know/
understand?
 How can the intercultural matter for our students
in the classroom?
 What are we assessing?
 What do we see as the evidence of intercultural
understanding?
 How do we know that what we are assessing is
valid?

5. A divergence of views
 Impossible to assess: deals with growth,
socio-cultural development, state of being
 Possible to assess: reasonable to take a
snapshot along a continuum, albeit an
unpredictable one
 Curriculum statements increasingly
include a notion of the intercultural but its
assessment is not always clear

6. La Cantine
The purpose of assessment is for students
to recognise
 That there is not one way to have lunch
and
 that ‘lunchtime’ means different things to
different people.

7. Interactions
 An initial discussion in English about their understanding
of what is a canteen, comparing experiences from Glen
Osmond and other schools within Australia and
overseas.
 Written task in English responding to: Describe how you
imagine la cantine in a French school to be.
 Spoken responses in French of meal preferences in a
French cantine.
 Written examples in French of meal preferences taken
from a French school menu
 Written self reflections about lunchtime in France and
Glen Osmond, after working with several French texts.

8. Interactions continued
Written reflections to following questions:
n Imagine you are going to spend a week or so with a
family in France. You will be going to school with
them. What will it be like at lunchtime?
n A French student is visiting Glen Osmond for a short
time and will be with your class. What do you need to
tell them about lunchtime in your school in order for
them to feel comfortable?
n Where would you prefer to spend your lunchtime?
Explain your reasons.

9. Youth Culture:
Pari-Roller Event
The purpose of the assessment is three-fold:
 To assess the students’ writing ability as a
response to a written text (a SACE required
task).
 To assess the student’s understanding of the
cultural context of the text to which s/he must
respond.
 To assess the student’s appreciation of their
own cultural perspective in writing the response.

10. Re-evaluating the intercultural
 Going beyond cultural comparisons
 Interpreting similarities & differences
 Discussions in English more prevalent
 Traditional ways of assessment not
adequate
 A move towards considering “data points”

11. DATA POINTS
 The trouble is that sometimes you get an insight
from a student through spontaneous and
unplanned conversation. It is difficult to formally
call that a data point for collecting evidence, at
least, at a practical level in the classroom, even
though, in a sense, it is actually a data point at
which some “evidence” emerges. Perhaps “data
points” are those moments students believe they
have gained some insight, whether planned or
unplanned. How to practically capture them is
the challenge.

12. SUMMARY:
the experience of identifying data points
 Some activities simply elicited points of
comprehension of cultural material rather
than demonstrating an “intercultural”
positioning.

13. TYPES OF ASSESSMENT
 Inherent assessments
informal, perhaps non-verbal
 Discursive assessments
social group discussions, evaluative
 Documentary assessments
evaluation for a scheme

14. FOCUS FOR SECOND ROUND
 “We are moving from an educational practice of
assessment where we have defined a priori what
we are looking for, to an educational practice
where we formulate representations to better
understand and transform the world around us.
If our purpose is to understand and support
learning and knowing and to make inferences
about these phenomena, then it seems that the
ideas of inquiry – open, critical, dialogic – rather
than assessment (as is currently understood)
would be more helpful.”
 Delandshere 2002

15. Assessing Intercultural
Understanding
 How do we move from the cultural to the
intercultural?
 What exactly do we want students to learn?
What language is needed to do so?
 Why is it important?
 What data or evidence captures the learning?
 What are the questions we need to ask students
to progress to the intercultural?
 What processes will we use to gather this? How
can we connect the “data” points?

16. FOCUS FOR SECOND ROUND
 More on new ways of understanding
assessment rather than adapting existing tasks
 More on the process of thinking than the end
product
 More on the key questions and what we are
trying to elicit
 More on the evidence for cultural positioning
 More on the real rather than the imagined

17. FOCUS FOR SECOND ROUND
 More on the intercultural capabilities than the
content – a de-centred approach
 More on the development of individual students
 More on the relationship between language &
culture rather than on either language or culture
 More on the data points than the assessment
tasks

18. FOCUS FOR SECOND ROUND
Males Females
1 in year 10 3 in year 10
10 in year 11 13 in year 11
Of which: Of which:
6 African (Congo, Burundi) 2 African (Congo, Kenya)
1 German 3 German
1 Laotian/French 7 Anglo-Australian
1 French school-aged
2 Anglo-Australians 4 Anglo-Australian
adults

19. MULTICULTURALISM
to see one’s own culture and that of
the other in a different light
 Journal writing (French & English)
 Audio recordings of interactions (French &
English)
 Oral reports in French
 Comprehension exercises (French & English
responses)
 The required vocabulary building & grammar
work
 A final written task in French symbolising the
cumulative end-point

20. ACTIVITY - REFLECTIONS ON
THE WORD “CULTURE”
 1. Quel est le peuple dont vous vous sentez le plus proche?
Pourquoi?
 What people/population/tribe/country do you feel closest to?
Why?
 2. Comment décririez-vous vos compatriots? (qualities et défauts)
 How would you describe your compatriots? (qualities and faults)
 3. Quels sont les symbols de votre pays?
 What are the symbols of your country?
 4. Quels sont les particularités de votre langue?
 What are the characteristics of your language?
 5. Qu’est-ce qui pourrait choquer un étranger?
 What could shock a foreigner (in your country)?
 6. Comment se passe un marriage traditionnel chez vous?
 Describe a traditional wedding in your country.

21. ACTIVITY - Comic strips on
racism & prejudice

22. ACTIVITY
 Vocabulary building related to
multiculturalism
 Structures, emotions, writing advice to
someone caught between two cultures
 History of migration in Australia & France
 Police harassment of French youth

23. Laïcité and the wearing of “ostentatious” religious
symbols in French schools

24. ACTIVITIES
 An oral response in French on “Do you
think Australia is multicultural?”
 Journal writing in French and/or English
summarising what they had gained from
the lessons
 Extension work for some responding to
article on girl from Cameroon in France
lamenting her black skin

25. Writing assessment
 Interpret these pictures and your responses to them

26. EVIDENCE OF ENGAGEMENT
 Whole class engaged
 Appreciation of the topic
 African students participated less publicly
 Australian girls participated most publicly
 African & German students thought
Australia was multicultural
 Australian students, esp. adults, less so

27. EVIDENCE OF LEARNING
 Language development, better ability in
articulating views
 Year 10 student stated topic an eye
opener, changed behaviour and attitude
 Yr 11 girl stated she changed her view of
Australians, more multicultural than she
thought
 African girl stated she re-appraised her
own culture and appreciated it more

28. EVIDENCE OF LEARNING
 While most other students could articulate
an opinion about the other culture, e.g.
wearing the scarf, the concept of laïcité,
few articulated the reasons for their own
cultural viewpoint
 The unknown is the internal changes, if
any, of students - the greater appreciation
of language related to culture

29. Assessment of the Intercultural
 Can the intercultural be easily accounted
for in a summative assessment task?
 Being articulate versus having an insight.
 Explicitly teaching the intercultural.
 Intercultural teaching not a recipe.
 The art of asking the right questions.