Ellen Serafini has published "Assessing students through a critical language awareness framework," a chapter in Heritage Language Teaching: Critical Language Awareness Perspectives for Research and Pedagogy (Loza & Beaudrie 2021, Routledge). Serafini examines the issue of how to assess the impact of pedagogies and curriculum designed to promote students' critical language awareness (CLA), a key issue as educators increasingly recommend that CLA be included as a pedagogical objective of language instruction.
After a review of CLA as a learning objective and pedagogical practice, Serafini argues for the importance of including CLA in curricular and programatic evaluations. She calls for longitudinal quantitative and qualitative measures capable of tracking student development over time, and offers multiple concrete suggestions. As such, the chapter not only identifies a crucial gap in research and practice, but also charts a course for future directions.
April 13, 2022
