Tried and Tested: Linguistic Mediation as a Test Task in Languages for Specific Purposes
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | With the current emphasis on moving the language classroom closer to authentic language interaction settings, there has been a significant shift in teaching and, consequently, also assessing towards practical language skills. In the Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) context, these include linguistic mediation, i.e. a skill that enables conveying ideas and information to others across language, but also across discipline-specific barriers, often contributing to successful plurilingual or even pluricultural encounters and communication in professional settings. Activities that train LSP students to talk to lay people efficiently while mediating the key terms and concepts are now recognised as important and relatively easy to find and/or to develop by teachers themselves. However, it has been argued that mediation cannot be adequately assessed: since it gives substantial leeway to the test-taker, some responses that need to be assessed may be unexpected, unsuitable, or inaccurate. This raises a series of questions, such as how CEFR descriptors can assist in assessing these responses impartially and where to set the boundary between what is still acceptable and what is not. The presentation sets out to demonstrate that mediation may also be adequately assessed, both in oral testing and in written tests. To this end, it will analyse an original exam task developed for second-year university students of Legal English that includes both intra- and cross-language mediation aspects and show its suitability for mediation while sharing samples of student work and discussing the potential challenges involved in assessing the students’ responses. |