• LTRG Home
• Membership
• Programme
• Projects
• PhD Students' Research
• Language Testing Update
• Resources in Language Testing
• LAEL Home

An evaluation of the assessment practices on a pre-sessional academic support programme

Researchers: Jayanti Banerjee and Dianne Wall

As the number of non-native speakers of English studying at universities in the United Kingdom (UK) has grown, so has the need to provide pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. One of the challenges facing the organisers of such courses is deciding how to determine whether students have completed them successfully and whether they are ready to enter their academic departments.

We reviewed research into assessment on pre-sessional and other EAP support courses, and summarised the results of a survey of practice in a number of universities in the UK and other countries in order to develop and refine an exit assessment checklist (click here for the full version).

In the first phase of our work we investigated the validity of the new exit assessment checklist in the following ways:

1. Content relevance and coverage
2. Interpretation and use of the new instrument

The results have been written up in Banerjee, J. & Wall, D. (2006) Assessing and reporting performances on pre-sessional EAP courses: Developing a final assessment checklist and investigating its validity, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5, 50 - 69.

We are now planning further validation procedures.

Further information is available from Dianne Wall.