Different Definitions of Language and Language Learning.

This chapter discusses the implications for assessment of changes in our conceptualization of English language learning. The chapter begins by proposing that different models of language and language learning result in very different perceptions of language learning goals and hence, different judgments of individual success and failure. This is exemplified with reference to a two year longitudinal ethnographic study of Hong Kong-born Cantonese-speaking students completing their final two years of English in a Melbourne secondary school. The detailed linguistic analysis of the students' written argument revealed a shift in the students' preferred genre, a shift apparently linked to the very different expectations and socialisation practices of Australian and Hong Kong schools as well as to conflicting subject discourses. However, the evaluation, and the consequences, of this shift depended on which model of argument and its development was foregrounded by teacher-assessors. In the absence of any clear guidance from examination boards, teachers made their own implicit and, usually, negative judgments without realising their own involvement in the co-construction of the students' arguments. The chapter concludes with some implications for assessment policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]