ASSESSING

BILINGUALISM
GROUP 7

VAISHNAVI A/P RAJENDRAN GAYATHREE A/P CHANDRAN NUR SYAHIRAH BT ABDULLAH ADLI AIN ZULAIKHA
(P100252) (P100244) (P99374) AHMAD AZMAN (P99306)
 Definition of terms

The ability to
use more than
one language Bilingualism
(Mackey 1962)

A means of
approaching,
entering,
Assessment exiting,
communicating
with and making
use of
 Bilingual Education

Two district languages are used for general teaching.

• First and second language

Rationale
• Bahasa Malaysia is a national and official language.
• No one is to prevent anybody from speaking and teaching other languages.
 Aspects in Assessing Bilingualism
Assess language competence of English Language
• There are some test such as TOEFL and Cambridge English
Language Assessment.

Assess vocabulary knowledge

• There is a test called The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test to
measure students understanding on vocabulary in particular
language.

Students performance evaluation

• Teacher can evaluate a student by giving some tasks in
particular skills that involved in English and Bahasa Malaysia.
 How do we assess bilingualism
Vocabulary level
• Earliest stage/ easiest level
• Tested in isolation
• Translate from one language to another
• Multiple choice questions/ open ended questions

Syntax level
• Mid level / phrases
• A phrase is given pupils need to translate from one language to another
• Multiple choice questions/ open ended questions

Sentence level
• Final level / complex level
• A picture is given and pupils need to write sentences in both languages
• Open ended questions
 Factors that effect bilingualism
The variety of social/ethnic background
• If the student is being brought up from a monolingual family it makes it hard
for them to practice their second language which is English.
• It will leads to such errors i.e pronunciations.
• If the student come from bilingual background it will be easier to asses them.

Poorly motivated students

• In a formal assessment, the poorly motivated student will leave blank pages
and will randomly pick an answer.
• This will make it hard to know what level they are actually in.

Age factor
• Primary students have limited vocabulary so they will tend to use the same
word over and over again.
• While secondary students have a broader vocabulary.
 Advantages / disadvantages of
Assessing Bilingualism

advantage disadvantage
Students will make mistakes in both
Students can
languages as they are easily
respond in
confused by the grammatical
either language
structures.

Helps students Students will apply the knowledge from

one language to the other, which in some
to understand cases work but in most cases don’t. Such as
the instructions idioms and proverbs, they will tend to
better direct translate it.
 Assessment
Assessment plays a key role in educations.

The correct time to assess a student is on the first day he or she come to school. It
is to identify students level in particular subjects or language.

Good teaching involves ongoing assessment which can be said as formative

assessment.

Fair assessment is not necessarily on one which student can perform well and get
a high score but it is to assess and provide a score which is reasonable for the
students ability.
 ISSUES RAISED

How do we know the students has adequate vocabulary for his or her age?
By referring to the respective Dokumen Standard Kandungan Pelajaran
(DSKP) whereby a student aged 9 should have vocabularies stated in DSKP
year 1, year 2 and year 3 by the end of year 3.