Beyond Advanced Proficiency: Using Portfolio Assessment to Evaluate Expertise in Communicating in Chinese as a Foreign Language

• Main Author: Zhini Zeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages 2018-06-01
• Series: Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages
• Subjects: foreign language assessment; portfolio; expertise; Mandarin Chinese
• Online Access: http://www.ncolctl.org/files/Jncolctl-vol-24/Beyond%20Advanced%20Proficiency%20Using%20Portfolio%20Assessment....pdf
• ISSN: 1930-9031; 1930-9031

Assuring the effectiveness of a language program requires assessing students’ performances throughout their learning career. This study explores how people from different areas of expertise assess non-native speakers’ domain-related performances in Chinese. The study obtained both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of two American professionals’ domain-related Chinese uses from three types of native Chinese raters including domain insiders, non-teacher domain outsiders, and Chinese instructors. A substantive discrepancy is found between evaluations of domain insiders and evaluations of Chinese instructors. Domain insiders attend to the nature of each domain activity, only recognizing the utterances that fulfill certain functions within the domain. Meanwhile, a lack of domain knowledge prevents Chinese teachers from assigning meanings to lexical, grammatical, phonological, and discourse structures used for domainrelated activity. Based on these empirical findings, this study recommends using performance portfolio assessment with descriptive and transparent criteria to assess advanced level Chinese uses in highly contextualized domain-related performances.