Transforming Foreign Language Teaching Practices through Communicative Classroom-based Assessment Programs

In today's foreign language (FL) education, FL teachers universally recognize the importance of fostering students' ability to communicate in the FL. However, existing assessments often do not sufficiently evaluate this crucial aspect. Instead, assessments primarily focus on formal language knowledge in isolation, disconnected from real-world communicative contexts. This misalignment between assessment practices and communicative objectives, which is particularly prevalent in the lower form of secondary education in the Netherlands, hampers effective FL teaching. The aim of this PhD research project was to gather insight into the potential of assessments to steer FL teaching practices. To this end, tools for developing communicative classroom-based assessment (CBA) programs were designed and implemented in practice, in close collaboration with FL teachers. The first study reported upon in this dissertation (Chapter 2) investigates which factors contribute to the identified lack of alignment between learning goals and assessment practices. The second study (Chapter 3) then shows how CBA-tools were co-designed to overcome the challenges FL teachers face when developing assessments. The third study (Chapter 4) explores how these tools were used by other FL teachers (who did not take part in the co-design process) to implement a communicative CBA program in their own context. In the final study (Chapter 5), effects of the newly designed CBA programs on teaching practices are investigated, taking both teachers’ and students’ perspectives into account. Findings reveal that assessing FL competencies in a more communicative way can transform teaching practices, placing communicative abilities at the heart of FL education. Charline Rouffet is a foreign language teacher educator and a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, in collaboration with Utrecht University.