Indigenous language professionals explore strengths-based language proficiency assessment

For 30 years, SFU’s Indigenous Languages Program (INLP) has been building relationships with Indigenous communities throughout the province. At the centre of the innovative approach is that Indigenous language learning is offered to students within their own communities. 

An out-of-the-box approach to academic learning, INLP is incredibly successful. Program graduates are empowered with knowledge in one of 14 Indigenous languages.

Despite these efforts to preserve and revitalize Indigenous languages, measures to assess proficiency are not widely available or used. Lacking such assessment methods can form an obstacle to accurately determining levels of language proficiencies among teachers and learners.

To address this, INLP and SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) invited the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) to Burnaby campus to lead an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) Assessment workshop.

Indigenous language educators, activists, and policy makers participated in the workshop. Guided by ACTFL facilitator Kathy Akiyama, participants were familiarized with Oral Proficiency Interviews, a method of proficiency-based spoken-language assessment. The assessment, which takes the form of a conversations between a more advanced learner with a less advanced learner, focuses on what a speaker can do in a language in a spontaneous setting. By using particular criteria to assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of a speaker’s production of a particular language in this way, the OPI is a practical, hands-on method for understanding the speaker’s knowledge and facility with a language.

Over the course of the week, participants learned strategies for administering the OPI, evaluated model interviews in English, and brainstormed how the OPI might be useful for evaluating Indigenous language proficiency. Participants also spent time working in language-specific breakout groups for each of their six languages: Hulʼqʼumiʼnumʼ, Inuktitut, Secwepemctsín, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim, Tlingit, and X̱aad Kíl. In these groups, participants developed assessment questions in their languages, discussed strategies for adapting the OPI to be culturally relevant and appropriate, and conducted practice OPIs. The workshop also featured rich discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of OPI and how it might be adapted and incorporated into larger language assessment strategies.

This successful workshop is, we hope, the first of more collaborative, community-engaged language revitalization events on campus. Combining diverse ways of thinking and working together, INLP and FASS hope to strengthen and improve Indigenous language learning efforts at SFU for many more decades to come.