4.1 Focus and Types of Assessment in CLIL

4.1 Focus and Types of Assessment in CLIL

Quick Answer: In a CLIL classroom, assessment can focus on content, language, or both, plus cognitive skills, learning skills, practical skills, and communication skills. Six recognized types - formative, summative, peer, self, portfolio, and performance assessment - give teachers different windows onto a learner's progress. Can Do statements and explicit assessment criteria make those judgments concrete and consistent. Assessment is the smallest of the four TKT: CLIL content areas, worth 13% of the exam (2 tasks, 10 of the 80 questions), tested through matching and multiple-choice items.

What Assessment Can Focus On

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms teach a non-language subject - science, geography, history, art - through a second or foreign language. Because two things are happening in every lesson at once, subject learning and language learning, assessment in a CLIL classroom is never automatically "about" only one of them. The TKT: CLIL syllabus identifies five possible focuses for any piece of assessment:

• Content and/or language - subject knowledge, language ability, or a deliberate combination of the two
• Cognitive skills - thinking processes such as classifying, comparing, predicting, or evaluating
• Learning skills - strategies learners use to manage their own learning, such as note-taking or using a dictionary
• Practical skills - hands-on abilities such as measuring, drawing a diagram, or operating equipment
• Communication skills - how effectively a learner exchanges information, negotiates meaning, or works with a partner

Because a single CLIL task can touch several of these focuses at once, the syllabus stresses that teachers must be clear about which focus they are assessing at any given moment. A group project on volcanoes could, in one lesson, be assessed for scientific accuracy (content), for the vocabulary used on the group's poster (language), for how well pairs divided up the work (communication skills), and for how well a learner planned their own research time (learning skills). Without a clear focus, feedback becomes vague and grades become inconsistent - a learner might be marked down for a language slip on a task that was only ever meant to test content understanding, or praised for fluent language on a task meant to test scientific accuracy.

Six Types of Assessment

Worked Example: A CLIL Science Unit on the Water Cycle

Consider a six-week CLIL science unit on the water cycle, taught in English to learners whose first language is not English.

• Formative: Throughout the unit, the teacher circulates during pair work, asking quick questions ("What happens to the water here?") and noting who confuses "evaporation" with "condensation." This ongoing check reshapes the next day's lesson.
• Peer: Learners swap labeled water-cycle diagrams and use a simple checklist ("Are all four stages labeled? Is the arrow direction correct?") to give each other feedback before submitting a final version.
• Self: Before a test, learners rate themselves against a Can Do statement ("I can describe the water cycle using at least four key terms in English"), identifying which stages they still need to revise.
• Portfolio: Diagrams, glossaries, and short written explanations produced across the six weeks are kept together, letting the teacher and learner see growth from the first rough sketch to the final polished report.
• Performance: In week five, small groups act out the water cycle as a short physical demonstration for the class; the teacher watches live, judging both the scientific sequencing and the target-language narration used.
• Summative: The unit closes with a short written test using matching items (term-to-definition) and multiple-choice questions, covering both vocabulary and the stages of the cycle.

Worked Example: Assessing Content Only, Language Only, or Both

Now take a single piece of work from that unit - a learner's written report describing the water cycle - and see how the same script can be marked three different ways:

1. Content only: The teacher uses a rubric that checks whether the four stages (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection) are named and sequenced correctly, ignoring spelling and grammar entirely. A learner who writes "water go up sky, then rain fall down" with strong scientific sequencing but weak grammar scores well.
2. Language only: A second rubric ignores scientific accuracy and instead scores sentence structure, vocabulary range, and grammatical accuracy - a learner with confused science but fluent, accurate English would score well here.
3. Both, reported separately: The teacher gives two clearly labeled scores - one for content, one for language - rather than blending them into a single unclear number. This lets the learner, and the teacher, see exactly where a strength or weakness lies.

Reporting content and language separately is the safest default in CLIL: it stops a learner's strong subject knowledge from being hidden by language difficulties, and stops strong language skills from disguising weak content understanding.

Can Do Statements and Assessment Criteria

Two tools make all six types of assessment above workable in practice:

• Can Do statements describe, in plain and observable terms, what a learner is able to do - for example, "Can label a diagram of the water cycle using at least four key terms in English." Because they describe an observable action rather than an abstract level, both learner and teacher can check them directly against a piece of work.
• Assessment criteria are the explicit standards used to judge quality - for instance, "diagram includes all four stages," "arrows show correct direction," "at least three key terms used accurately." Written down and shared with learners in advance, criteria keep judgments consistent from one piece of work to the next and from one assessor to another, and they let learners know exactly what a strong answer looks like before they attempt the task.

Used together, Can Do statements and explicit criteria turn assessment in CLIL from a vague overall impression into a transparent, defensible judgment - one that can show precisely whether a gap in performance comes from content, from language, or from both.