Assessing Young Language Learners.Penny McKay. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Pp. xi + 388.

� The tremendous interest in teaching additional languages to childrenhas scarcely been matched by a corresponding level of activity in theassessment of younger learners. The aim of this book is to link the latestthinking in applied linguistics, child psychology, and pedagogy to bestpractices in the assessment of children from 5 to 12 years old. As such,it will be welcomed by experienced teachers, program coordinators, andresearchers into assessment and second language acquisition. It differsfrom its companion volumes in the Cambridge Language AssessmentSeries in that it devotes relatively little emphasis to formal testing. In-deed, McKay builds a strong case for the limitations of traditional penciland paper tests and provides informed and detailed analyses of the manyalternatives available to educators.

The opening chapter, aptly titled “A Special Case for Young LearnerAssessment,” contrasts children with adults in key areas such as literacyand cognitive skills. Chapter 2, “Young Learners and Language Learn-ing,” closely examines the nature of children’s language competencefrom sociocultural and cognitive perspectives, and chapter 3, “ResearchInto the Assessment of Young Learners,” links this to the relevant litera-ture. Chapter 4, “Assessing Language Use Through Tasks,” uses theBachman & Palmer (1996) framework for analyzing task usefulness in ayoung learner context. “Classroom Assessment of Language Use,” chap-ter 5, is what McKay calls “the cornerstone of assessment for younger

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learners” (p. 173) because of its tight connection between teaching andassessing. This encomium contrasts with the critical stance adopted to-ward testing young learners through large-scale tests (chapter 9). Twochapters in between, “Assessing Oral Language” (chapter 6) and “Assess-ing Reading and Writing” (chapter 7), address the nature of the fourskills (listening is discussed with speaking) and methods of supportingtheir development, and the third, “Evaluating Young Learners’ Perfor-mance and Progress” (chapter 8) moves away from method to scoringcriteria. The final chapter, “The Way Forward,” outlines future directionsin the field with a plea for more collaboration between testing andteaching professionals.

McKay highlights a number of themes that are obscured in the adult-oriented assessment literature. One such issue is vulnerability: Young learn-ers are more susceptible to criticism than adults (p. 14). The practical resultis that children need constant feedback and reassurance during the assess-ment process. An ethical dimension is that children are easily hurt by scorereporting that labels them as underachieving. McKay also devotes muchattention to the challenge of constructing appropriate tasks for the agegroup. In terms of content, young learners can only successfully engagewith topics and situations that correspond to their world and experience(p. 31). All too often in an ESL environment, the performance of sec-ond-language children is measured alongside native-speaking childrenwith test instruments that assume familiarity with the target culture.Obviously, the result is bias toward the native speakers (p. 336).

Current understanding of young learner competences is, as McKayadmits (p. 61), somewhat patchy and inconclusive because of the dearthof empirical research into the second-language assessment of children.Assessment should be better informed by work in child language devel-opment, and in chapter 2 McKay identifies some very relevant positionson language learning. Some assertions from the literature, however, maybe accepted a little too unquestioningly. For example, McKay followsSkehan (1989) in stressing the importance of lexical chunks in commu-nication.

We know that when young learners are learning language, they rely heavi-ly on the formulaic system, incorporating chunks, or formulaic items, andusing these to understand and get their meaning across. This is so in firstand second language learning. (p. 36)

Actually, the role of chunks in young learners’ language acquisition iscontroversial. First, there are not enough relevant studies on childrenlearning English for McKay to be so categorical. It is telling that McKay’sreferences in this section are all to secondary sources rather than em-pirical investigations. Second, the parallel between first and second lan-guage acquisition is questionable. Not everyone accepts the contribution

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of chunks to first language acquisition. Generative linguists, for example,dismiss chunks as largely irrelevant to language development (see, e.g.,Radford, 1990, pp. 16–18). Formulaic language may be a feature ofchildren’s spoken discourse but it has not been proven how significant itis to language acquisition or communicative competence.

What is clear is that a large overlap exists between teaching and as-sessing young learners. It is a truism that children learn by doing, soMcKay advocates ongoing classroom assessment that mirrors, and oftenblends with, the learning process in the classroom. Methods of classroomassessment include observation of tasks (p. 153), portfolios (p. 159),projects (p. 163), storytelling (p. 198), and teacher–learner writing con-ferences (p. 258). McKay provides clear and realistic examples that showthe unique contribution teachers can make to classroom assessment.The spectre of reliability inevitably casts its dark shadow in alternativeassessment because appraisal could be inconsistent and subjective, espe-cially in a high-stakes situation (Read, 2000). McKay suggests that, gen-erally, reliability may need to be reconsidered with young learners be-cause children need a high level of individual support and feedbackduring tasks, which can lead to a less than level playing-field across atest-taking population. Reliability can be increased by standardizing thenature of the task and assessment. This is illustrated by application ofBachman & Palmer’s (1996) influential test usefulness framework.

Assessing Young Language Learners deserves a wide target audience be-cause it will inform academic research, professional test-writing, andclassroom practice for those working with and assessing young learners.It presents a state-of-the-art snapshot of a field that is still very much ina stage of tender development itself. Praticitioners may have to wait sometime for a few of the ways forward McKay envisages in the last chapter ofthe book, such as a journal devoted to assessing young learners (p. 362),but volumes like this provide hope that the first tottering steps in theright direction are being taken.

REFERENCES

Bachman, L., & Palmer, A. (1996). Language testing in practice. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax. Oxford: Black-well.

Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Shehan, P. (1989). Individual differences in second-language learning. London: Edward

Arnold.

WAYNE RIMMERReading UniversityReading, England

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