‘The course has given me more understanding of key issues related to assessment and awareness of the problems in marking and ways to deal with these problems’ said one of the English lecturers from the University of Science and Technology, Hanoi attending the recent course delivered by the British Council on ‘Assessing within the CEF Framework’.
The course took place from 20 to 22 October 2014. The short course aimed to give participants an introduction on how to develop in-house proficiency exams focusing on the levels of the CEF (Common European Framework). The course helped participants to ‘become more familiar with CEF scales’, ‘understand the assessment of CEF’, ‘understand the process of designing a test’ and ‘be able to design tests for my students at university’ were some of the items that the participants learnt.
This ties in with the current focus by MOET’s 2020 National Foreign Language Project on using the CEFR to test the English levels of students, teachers and lecturers. English departments at universities are now requested to redesign their curriculums and tests to align them with CEF levels. To meet the 2020 goals, English students are required to get B2, those studying non English majors, B1 and University lecturers, C1.
One of the suggestions for further course improvement was ‘to give longer workshops where more issues are included and elaborated and it is hoped that the course will be further developed so participants can develop full tests rather than short excerpts.
The British Council also currently offers an online 20 hour self-access course on ‘Communicative Assessment’. This is a short online self-access course for a closed group busy teachers and examiners of English who are interested in exploring new approaches to assessment and testing. The course aims to help participants to identify and use some of the key terminology associated with assessment and testing, focus on approaches to assessment and testing within the Communicative Approach to English Language Teaching and link assessment theory directly to the design of testing and assessment materials to focus on testing each language skill as well as integrating skills testing. Please contact EnglishConsultancy@britishcouncil.org.vn for further information.