176 / 2018-03-28 21:56:11

Aligning China's Standards of English (CSE) with CEFR

Alignment,CSE,CEFR

全体主题 > Standards in validating language assessments

This study describes the alignment of CSE with CEFR in terms of overall skill. The alignment generally includes content alignment and level alignment. Content alignment aims to seek the similarities of CEFR and CSE in the general principle, which is the theoretical foundation of CSE-CEFR alignment. Level alignment aims to figure out the relation of CSE nine levels and CEFR six levels based on similar scales and descriptors in CSE and CEFR.
Content alignment is fulfilled by textual comparison. Level alignment is realized by large-scale questionnaire survey and interviews. The questionnaires are designed according to the common-item-non-equivalent design (Kolen & Brennan, 2004, p. 23). All the CEFR descriptors make up of 15 questionnaires, which are linked together with CEFR internal anchors. And then CSE external anchor descriptors are added to each questionnaire to equate all the CEFR descriptors to the descriptor pool in CSE project. Altogether about 5,441 teachers and 23,260 students representative of all the Chinese English learners at different educational stages participated in this study. Responses from the teachers and students are respectively analyzed based on Rasch analysis (Linacre, 2014), the fixed common item parameter (FCIP) equating (Taherbhai & Seo, 2013) and a range of statistical analysis. The final results are generally obtained by a comprehensive consideration of student assessment and teacher assessment.
In terms of content alignment, CSE and CEFR share a lot in common in general principles. Both CSE and CEFR take the communicative approach to language to describe language proficiency from the perspectives of what to do and how to do with the can-do statements. There is some overlapping of the CSE categories and CEFR categories. In terms of the level alignment, it is not a one-to-one alignment between the CSE nine levels and the CEFR six broad levels. CSE descriptors of a certain level tend to scatter at several adjacent CEFR levels, one of which is relatively more predominant.
This alignment is helpful promoting the recognition of CSE in the world, promoting the mutual cooperation with other countries in terms of English teaching and assessment and realizing the connection of Chinese English testing and assessment system with present international English standards.