Testing in bilingual education projects: Lessons learnt from the Additive Bilingual Education Project

Abstract

This paper discusses the topic of bilingual testing and the role played by the language of tests in home-language-based bilingual education projects such as the Additive BiLingual Education (ABLE) project. First, I highlight how national, macro-contextual contradictions in language in education affected the project. More specifically the impact of discrepancies between the additive bilingual language in education policy (LiEP) Keywords: additive bilingual education; home-language-based bilingual education; postcolonial; language-in-education policy; testing and assessment; large-scale educational testing; annual national assessment; bias and equivalence; cross-linguistic testing; bilingual testing. PRE-AMBLEAs discussed in Koch, Landon, Jackson and Foli (2009), the primary aim of the Additive BiLingual Education (ABLE) project was to assist teachers at a rural Eastern Cape school with the translation of the 1997 South African Language in Education Policy into a workable model of implementation. The ABLE model advocated the maintenance of learners' mother tongue (MT), isiXhosa, as partial LoLT from grade R through grade 6. English, the first additional language, was introduced as a subject in the foundation phase, but learning the language and learning in the language occurred incrementally through the grades. In this manner, the previous abrupt switch to English as sole LoLT at grade 4 level was being circumvented. Learners in grade R in the experimental model spent 95% of curriculum time learning new concepts in their mother tongue. The remaining 5% represents their immersion in communicative English language activities. In grade 3, learners began to use English as a language of learning (a 20% time allocation) in preparation for the part-LoLT status of English in grade 4. Contrary to previous practices at the school, isiXhosa, under the bilingual model, served as primary-LoLT for an approximate 75% of the grade 4 curriculum. The model that was developed in consultation with the teachers increased English as LoLT to This paper deals with the impact of the South African educational testing programme (the Annual National Assessment also called the ANAs) on the ABLE project and what was learnt during the process. The seemingly covert language-in-education policy promoted by national testing contradicts the South Africa's Department of Basic Education's Language in Education policy of 1997 and had a disabling and negative effect on the project. It is important to understand and analyse the contradictions and provide concrete suggestions about the way forward -more specifically about the role that well-conceptualised and researched bi-and multilingual tests and assessment can play. The lessons that were learnt about testing in bilingual (home language-based bilingual) education projects are therefore discussed at two levels. Firstly, that which was learnt more broadly about processes and forces around testing, multilingual testing specifically, and the extent to which these processes and forces affected the project...

Credit Institution Liquidity Management as a Financial Stability Factor

“…Their sophistication leads to the change of the economic nature of the concept of liquidity, which is evident in the works of such economists as S. Brajovic-Bratanovic, H. Grüning, and T. Koch. [12], [13].…”