RATE Issues (Jul 2024)
MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. A Possible Means of Lexical Longitudinal Assessment of Very Young EFL learners
Abstract
Progress reports are one of the documents beginner Romanian teachers of English need to have included in their portfolios. Unfortunately, measuring progress is not as easy as it looks at first glance, as teachers need a testing tool that can be used longitudinally. Standard tests are easy to use and they have proved quite reliable with older students. Things become more complicated with young learners as the EFL standard tests targeting this age group are less complete and complex. Furthermore, they have hardly been scientifically tested. Under these circumstances, the aim of the present study was to make use of The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs), a standardized and widely researched first language testing tool, in order to assess children’s lexical progress in English as a FL. Accordingly, the receptive and productive vocabularies of a group of 51 young learners acquiring English as a FL in a formal immersion setting were measured across time by means of this tool. Afterwards and by means of the same test, the results were compared against those obtained by a control group made of 15 young learners of similar ages but who were learning English in a regular school setting with less hours of exposure per week. These outcomes were contrasted against those of other studies conducted with the same test, leading us to conclude that indeed the MB-CDIs could yield reliable longitudinal results with young EFL learners and hence could be used when writing the class or students’ progress reports.
