Multilingual and multimodal assessment in Content and Language Integrated Learning programmes

Project Summary:
In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students are learning content knowledge through their additional language (L2), and they also take assessments in the L2. This raises concerns about assessment validity and potential language barrier faced by students. This project seeks to explore how CLIL assessment can embrace multilingualism (i.e., students’ different languages) and multimodality (i.e., different modes of meaning making). The first phase of the study will be a textual analysis of a corpus of assessment questions collected from high-stakes public examinations, widely-used textbooks and workbooks, and school-based examinations, with a framework adapted from previous research on CLIL assessment and multimodality of disciplinary texts. Such textual analysis will be complemented with semi-structured interviews with teacher educators and experienced teachers. By doing so, this phase aims to explore the roles of multilingual and multimodal resources in current CLIL assessment practices.

Deliverables:
A conference presentation and an academic paper.

Preferred discipline(s):
Linguistics and Education

Project Essential Skills:
N/A

Other Selection Criteria (if any):
Experience of studying HKDSE Biology will be an advantage

Details of supervision arrangements:

• No lab work is required and students can perform the data analysis at home.
• Guidance on data analysis will be provided and regular progress meetings will be conducted face to face or through online means.
• Students will work in a small team to ensure inter-rater reliability.