Assessing Young Learners in Nigeria
The Nigerian national policy on education (NPE) recognizes Arabic and French as the languages of international communication and discourse (Emenanjo 2002). On that account, French is included in the curriculum and made a compulsory subject in primary and junior secondary schools but a non-vocational elective at the Senior Secondary Schools. According to NPE (2014), primary education is the education given to children aged 6 to 12 years, indicating that every child in Nigeria who has access to basic education is learning a foreign language. With this fact, the need to better understand the role of assessment in children's language learning processes and degrees of attainment is essential (McKay 2006). However, the NPE accounts that specialist teachers will be provided for particular subjects like French, teachers or other stakeholders may not have the right knowledge to access young learners. Not until recently did researchers begin investigating accessing young language learners (Butler 2016). The paper studies young learners' language assessment in Nigeria by adopting the descriptive approach of Butler's accessing young learners (2016). The approach describes young learners' characteristics and their learning contexts to indicate considerations that need to be made when designing and implementing assessments.
About Ayomide Ajagbe:
Ayomide Ajagbe is a final year master's English-Speaking Cultures student at the University of
Bremen, Germany. She has a background in Linguistics and is presently focused on the area of
multimodality. She is passionate about impact, and her career interests are development,
international relations, and communications. Apart from experience in communications that she
gained from her academic engagements, she has gained work experience in business development
and corporate services. Her other interests include public speaking and volunteering. Treasured
moments for her include traveling, starting something new, and quiet moments to reflect.
References
Butler, Yuko G. "Accessing Young Learners." Handbook of Second Language Assessment, edited by Dina Tsagari and Jayanti Banerjee, 2016, pp. 379-376. De Gruyter Muoton, doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614513827. Accessed 21 January 2021
Emenanjo, Nolue E. "Language Policies and Cultural Identities." LINGUAPAX http://www.linguapax.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CMPL2002_Plenari_EEmenanjo.pdf. Accessed 8 February 2020.
McKay, Penny. Assessing young language learners. Cambridge University Press, 2006.The Federal Republic of Nigeria. National Policy on Education. 6th ed., NERDC, 2014.