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Chapter 7 - Coggle Diagram
Chapter 7
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Language, testing and assessment
The testing and assessment are the most complex aspects of the nexus between language and formal schooling. Some of these are intended to measure language proficiency and others aim to measure subject area knowledge or achievement.
One indication of the importance of assessment for language professionals is the rapidly growing membership of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment.
Effective assessment of mother tongue/first language learning and subject area knowledge is inherently dependent upon awareness of myriad features of language and their possible influence on the test-takers’ ability to demonstrate learning.
The language of home, community and school
When children begin their formal schooling they already understand and speak the language(s) they have been exposed to and raised in at home, young children will also have developed the ability to communicate beyond their immediate families; in multilingual communities, children’s linguistic repertoires are thus likely to include knowledge of the other languages and language varieties they hear and see.
Child language socialization is not a universal process, but rather one which is shaped by specific cultural contexts:
- Some working-class children have restricted code, this includes limited use of adjectives and adverbs; short and grammatically simple sentences; and ‘poor syntactical construction.
- Middle-class children have elaborated codes that include more sophisticated use of adjectives and adverbs; grammatically complex and ‘accurate’ sentence-level syntax; conjunctions and prepositions indicating ‘logical’ relationships.
- Bernstein emphasized that these codes were social, rather than linguistic.
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Language and education
We have the necessary ingredients for strong opinions about which language(s) are suitable for the purposes of education and how they ought to be used in schools. This was the case in Soweto, where the apartheid government imposed Afrikaans as a language of schooling for South African students and police shot dozens of teenage students for staging protests against this language-in-education policy.