Assessment and Teacher Assessment Literacy in Bilingual Education

In the era of internationalisation, numerous students are learning non-language content subjects  through their additional language (L2). It follows that their academic achievement is often assessed in  their less proficient L2, which raises concerns over the validity and fairness of assessment for these  students. At the same time, teachers have not received sufficient professional support in terms of  designing assessment for these students.  In this seminar, the speaker will share her recent work on assessment for bilingual students studying  through English in Hong Kong secondary schools. She will first illustrate the cognitive and linguistic  demands imposed by high-stakes examination on bilingual students, and the potential impact of using  L2 in assessment on students’ academic achievement. She will then introduce a conceptual framework  for teacher assessment literacy in bilingual programmes and discuss how this can facilitate future  research and professional development in this field.

Dr Yuen Yi LO is an Associate Professor at the Teacher Education and Learning  Leadership (TELL) Unit of the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong  Kong. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and had worked  at the Hong Kong Education University prior to joining the University of Hong  Kong. Her research interests include bilingual education, Medium of Instruction  policy and classroom interaction. In recent years, she has been investigating the  professional development of teachers in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and issues  related to CLIL assessments. Her research has been published in Review of Educational Research,  International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Teaching and Teacher Education,  and her work has been collated in her monograph “Professional Development of CLIL Teachers”.