Assessing (for) Understanding in the CLIL Classroom

In this chapter, we conceptualise CLIL assessment as a dialogic activity in which teachers and learners share the responsibility for building learners’ understanding of subject-specific issues. We illustrate such a conceptualisation by first studying how secondary school CLIL teachers perceive classroom assessment in interviews collected in Finland and Austria. Then, by examining video data from a CLIL lesson, we show how opportunities for assessing to support learning can emerge in routine instructional interaction, and how a teacher can attend to learner talk both to develop his or her own understanding of the learner’s abilities and to promote these same abilities. Our data suggest that, when interviewed, CLIL teachers may not see their practices for supporting learners’ understanding from the perspective of assessment. Yet, our classroom interaction data shows that assessment is an inherent part of the interaction. We, therefore, propose teachers’ awareness should be raised in that the purpose of assessment they do in the latter case is assessment for understanding. This will underscore the importance of developing learners’ understanding of the concepts/phenomena under study and teachers’ understanding of their learners. We conclude by reflecting on the benefits of this awareness.