Michele de Courcy (University of Melbourne, Australia)

The ESL continuum for the VELS – the research and development process

The ESL continuum project was conceived in order for the Department of Education to meet one of its key priorities, which is improving learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy for higher needs students, of which many are ESL learners. The resources developed as a result of this project will build the capacity of schools to achieve this. Through the use of an ESL continuum based on the ESL stages of development the capacity of teachers to support ESL learners’ literacy development will be further enhanced.

In developing the continuum we aimed to:

• provide an assessment tool for teachers to effectively assess where their ESL students are up to and how to move them forward
• provide a tool for teachers to develop a shared language with which to describe ESL student progress and to have professional conversations with their colleagues
• provide support to teachers in planning for, monitoring and supporting individual ESL student progress toward moving towards the English VELS
• present evidence-based approaches to support improved student learning outcomes in learning English as a second language.

The approach used linked quality of language performance to a pupil’s language competence and then synthesised evidence to produce a standards referenced proficiency framework that can be linked to learning needs and appropriate assessment strategies. A standards referenced framework normally links stages of developmental learning and assessment to procedures for monitoring skill and competence levels and points directly to appropriate points of instructional intervention.

There were several steps involved in our creation of the ESL continuum, which will be described in this presentation:

1. Defining the framework or area of language development
2. Subdividing the framework into language domains
3. For each capability, listing the performance indicators which describe a typical set of indicative activities to be performed
4. For each indicator defining quality criteria that describe the quality of the performance
5. Establishing the relative difficulty of the criteria
6. Interpreting clusters of criteria at approximately the same levels of increasing competence
7. Linking the levels to teaching interventions

Once the criteria were drafted they were placed onto a continuum using the expert judgement of language specialists. The strategy for this approach is based Thurstone’s Law of comparative judgement. The process was undertaken in short workshops using a series of specialists and defined a continuum that would underpin the developmental progression of second language.