Download TEMPUS Conf Siena

Multilingual Situation in Russia:
Foreign Language Teaching and Testing
Tatyana Shkuratova
Alexander Noranovich
Southern Federal University, Russia
IATEFL TEASIG & UNISTRASI Conference, 23 November 2013, Siena, Italy
Federal State Statistics Service: http://www.gks.ru/
(taken from Plavskaya, 2012)
Teaching EFL in Russia
 special bilingual classroom environment –
artificial !
 poor motivation –
learning English for some hypothetical ‘special
occasion’, which never comes
 assessment is given little or no attention in
professional training
Context:
Tensions in the education system
ELT aims, content
and methods have
changed
Assessment has
largely remained
the same
(Anthony Green: TEMPUS ProSET All-Partners Meeting Presentation, February 2012,
University of Bedfordshire, England)
4
TEMPUS ProSET SFedU
Promoting Sustainable Excellence in Testing and Assessment of English
(ProSET):
 to develop and introduce new curricula in testing and assessment of
English, consistent with the EU Tuning system, that enhances transparent,
international, educational standards in language learning.
 To develop sustainable EU-Russia inter-university co-operation on testing
and assessment of English, thereby defining new language learning
standards and qualifications.
 To elaborate career development courses for Bachelor, Master,
Postgraduate students of philological faculties getting a degree in English
and for Secondary School teachers to build up their professional
knowledge in the area of language assessment.
Language testing/assessment:
A historical, educational, sociological, technological
phenomenon –a good example of a ‘complex
system’
An ‘inherently interdisciplinary venture’
Assessment ‘serves other disciplines, and vice versa’
and‘ the boundaries between theory and application
are increasingly blurred’
Lynda Taylor: TEMPUS ProSET Training Session, February 2012,
University of Bedfordshire, England
Teacher-textbook-student paradigm
1) studying and investigating foreign language culture
indirectly
2) ELL in the conditions of L1 dominance
3) classroom environment:
communication situations:
topics diversity
number of participants
4) mastering the language – for its own sake
5) language is acquired as a formal code
Characteristics of individuals




personal characteristics
topical knowledge
affective schemata
language ability
(Bachman and Palmer , 2009:64)
To start with…







Age
Sex
Nationality
Resident status
Native language
Level and type of general education
Type and amount of preparation or prior experience with a
given test
(Bachman and Palmer , 2009:65)
Specific test takers in mind?...
SFedU Master students: 2012-13 acad.year
 the English language aptitude
 socio-psychological factors
 ethnolinguistic factors
 multilingual ability
Construct validity of a test
test items should be scrutinized in order to check whether
certain groups of test takers are advantaged or disadvantaged
by the test as a result of their cultural and educational
background.
The target test-taking group of this test is heterogeneous.
Test takers speak a wide variety of first languages, have a
wide variety of cultural and social backgrounds, and come
from, or intend to study in, a wide variety of academic
disciplines.
(John H.A.L. De Jong, Ying Zheng, 2011)
Taken from Bachman (1990, 87):
Anthony Green: TEMPUS ProSET Training Session, February 2012,
University of Bedfordshire, England
SFedU: 159 master students of the FPhJ,
39 of them - immigrants and international students
Personal characteristics:
Age:
between 22 and 24
Sex:
male and female
Nationalities: Russian, Kazakh, Tatar, Mongolian, Chinese,
Turk, Ukrainian, Congo, Zimbabwe
Immigrant status: immigrants and international students
(28%)
Native languages: varied (both Nostratic and non-Nostratic)
Level and type of general education: BA
Type and amount of preparation or prior experience with a
given test: none
Language Ability Checklist
(taken from Bachman and Palmer, 2009: 77)
Component of language ability
GRAM: Vocabulary
GRAM: Syntax
GRAM: Phonological/Graphological
TEXT: Cohesion
TEXT: Rhetorical organisation
FUNCT: Ideational
FUNCT: Manipulative
FUNCT: Heuristic
FUNCT: Imaginative
SOCIO: Dialect
SOCIO: Register
SOCIO: Naturalness
SOCIO: Cultural references and figurative language
META: Goal setting
META: Assessment
META: Planning
Comments
1) native Russian speakers
2) students of other nationalities
3) recent immigrants
4) international students
Rostov Region, Southern Federal District, Russia
Nationality
Population, thousands
Language group
Russian
3800
Slavic/
Indo-European
Armenian
111
Isolated Indo-European
Ukrainian
78
Slavic/
Indo-European
Turk
36
Turkic/Altaic
Azerbaijan
18
Turkic/Altaic
Gipsy
17
Romani/ Indo-Iranian/
Indo-European
Belorussian
16
Slavic/
Indo-European
Tatar
14
Turkic/Altaic
Others
116
Indo-European, NorthernCaucasian, Non-Nostratic
Cognitive demand at different levels
 How well calibrated the cognitive processing
demands made upon candidates are in the design of
the tasks and items?
 Is there a shift from tasks that focus on decoding to
tasks that focus on meaning building from main
ideas, to a text level representation to intertextual
representation?
(Cyril Weir: TEMPUS ProSET All-Partners Meeting Presentation, February 2012,
University of Bedfordshire, England)
Imprecise use of vocabulary items?
Inaccurate cultural references?
A very few structures?




Word recognition
Lexical access
Syntactic parsing
Establishing propositional meaning at the clause or sentence
level
 Inferencing
 Constructing a mental model
(Cyril Weir: TEMPUS ProSET All-Partners Meeting Presentation, February 2012,
University of Bedfordshire, England)
Dianne Wall:
Laying a theoretically grounded foundation for the
examination of English will also have a great impact on
teaching and assessment in other foreign language such as
German, French and Russian.
This will ensure a gradual increase in the number of
professional teachers in schools and consequently the system
of education will become more effective and able to satisfy
the demands of society for educated people.
(EALTA Conference Presentation, May 2013, Istanbul, Turkey)
Thank you
[email protected]
[email protected]