Doing English digital: An assessment model for a new college English curriculum in China.

摘要

With the rapid growth of the Internet in China, the increasing connection between English and technology creates new demands for College English education. To succeed in higher education and the workplace for the 21st century, Chinese students should have knowledge and skills not only in English, but also in digital technology. However, these new literacy skills are not reflected in current College English tests, which are built around a traditional testing paradigm. To help students develop these new literacy skills, a new approach to curriculum and assessment is required.; Working with the emerging paradigm based on digital literacy, this study explores the use of project assessment for a new College English curriculum at Peking University. In a hybrid learning environment, which combines both online and face-to-face modes of instruction, 15 undergraduate students from different departments used digital resources to conduct a semester-long research project in his or her major area of study. Scoring rubrics built around content, clarity and critical/creative thinking were developed for evaluating oral and written presentations of the projects. Two oral and two written evaluators used the rubrics to evaluate student presentations.; Quantitative analysis showed an overall consistency between the evaluators in applying the oral and written rubrics. As anticipated, the results based on project assessment suggested only a marginal association with those based on standardized testing. Qualitative analysis showed that, for written presentations, high-level achievers tend to perform equally well on all three criteria in the rubric; however, mid-level achievers tend to perform better on a single criterion, but less well on the other two criteria, especially the criterion of critical/creative thinking; for oral presentations, the major difference between high-level achievers and those at lower levels lies in their capacity to effectively integrate spoken text with written text and images.; The overall results of the study indicate that project assessment is effective in assessing English-based digital literacy for College English students at Peking University. It is hoped that such assessment can be more widely used to complement the national tests used to assess College English students throughout China.