Abstract

In this paper the methodology of the Discussion Boards language assessment in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Advanced Business Russian course at Regent’s University London is discussed by drawing on the students’ responses to the teacher’s comments based on two business topics studied in class. In order to concretise our assessment, this paper suggests an assessment method based on Biggs and Collis’ SOLO Taxonomy for analysing how the students’ language learning outcomes matched the SOLO Taxonomy levels of understanding and the rubric scores of the Discussion Boards Assessment. The obtained data indicate that the language learning outcomes may be directly connected with the levels of students’ thinking and their ability to construct content. In this paper the problem of the difference between the Advanced Business Russian learning and teaching methods and those suggested by some researchers is analysed underscoring the fact that in the Advanced Business Russian course business academic language is used which is different from everyday language discourse. Drawing on the two questionnaires offered to the students before and after their participation in the Discussion Boards Assessment, it is also argued that their learning perspective changed as a result of their collective work on the assessment task. The paper concludes that this underscores the learner’s central role in the learning process and their ability to construct knowledge.

Keywords

content and language, teaching and assessment, advanced business russian course, data