Language assessment in different disciplines : uses of mediation in university English courses

Abstract

The CEFR Companion Volume (CV) (2020) has reshaped our understanding of the foreign language student when it advocates the view of the learner as a 'social agent' who uses language(s) to interact with others. To support this view, the CEFR CV promotes new dynamic categories to describe language competences; reception, production, interaction and mediation. This shift to learner agency naturally requires adjustment from the part of the teacher, too. Presumably, it is the concept of mediation that has puzzled teachers most. This is why the authors of the Companion Volume have now provided a detailed explanation of mediation and its application; examples of how we all naturally use it in every-day communication. They have explained specific activities and strategies, among others mediating a text, mediating concepts, and mediating communication. In this article, we focus on assessment of mediation. We describe tasks that we use in our practice to assess our students' ability to mediate a text through examples from the English for Specific/Academic Purposes (e.g., Medical English, Business English) offered at the University of Oulu. In addition, we discuss potential difficulties and opportunities when creating mediation assessment tasks especially when we consider disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural differences.