Wednesday 20 May, 13.00 UK time. Register now.
In today's linguistically diverse classrooms, how can we truly capture the full scope of a child's knowledge and skills? Standardised tests and traditional assessments often only evaluate what is taught in many language classrooms. But a child's linguistic and cultural identity is shaped by a much wider world: the languages spoken at the dinner table, the stories shared by grandparents and with school friends, the cultural celebrations in their community.
How do we assess that?
Join the researchers behind a pioneering project in a Catalan primary school for an in-depth webinar that explores a radical new approach to evaluation. We moved beyond top-down models to co-create a plurilingual and intercultural competence rubric with the very people it was designed to serve: teachers, children, and their families.
What you'll learn
- The co-creation process: How we brought teachers, children, and parents together as equal partners in designing an assessment tool.
- From framework to real life: Practical strategies for translating broad CEFR descriptors into meaningful, child-friendly criteria grounded in everyday experiences.
- Inclusive by design: How we made the rubric jargon-free, visually supported, and accessible for families who don't share the school's vehicular language.
- A context-sensitive and sustainable model: Why this way of working with children is adaptable across age groups, easy to integrate into daily classroom life, and (potentially) digitally accessible for the long term.
- Key research findings: What happens when assessment values children's full linguistic and cultural repertoires—and how this model can work in your context.
Why you should attend
This webinar is essential viewing for:
- Primary school teachers and teaching assistants
- School leaders and curriculum developers
- Language researchers and teacher trainers
- Educational policymakers
- People planning new research in this area
- Anyone passionate about inclusive education, multilingualism, and culturally responsive assessment.
Our project adds a vital new voice to the under-researched area of rubric co-creation. We offer more than just a tool; we offer a proof of concept that shows what's possible when we trust and value the expertise of our entire school community.
Presenters:
Janine Knight
Janine Knight is a teacher of English, teacher trainer and researcher with extensive experience in the English 'Foreign'/'Additional'/'Second' language classroom across contexts (Spain and the UK) and sectors (Nursery, Primary, Secondary, Further and Higher Education). Among other lines of research, she is interested in practical ways that children's plurilingual, pluricultural and intercultural knowledge and skills can develop and be made visible in both classroom scenarios and assessment practices. Alongside her doctoral work on learner agency in speaking tasks, she has led a number of collaborative, research partnerships between schools and universities and has presented at numerous international, national and local conferences on various aspects of teaching and learning English.
Marta Segura
Marta Segura is a lecturer and researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona specialising in language acquisition, multilingualism, and CLIL education. Her work explores early foreign-language development, vocabulary learning, and teacher training, focusing on how multilingualism, exposure (in and outside of school), and educational practices influence English learning outcomes among young learners in multilingual school contexts.