[POLISH]

July 2017

Dear Teachers, Lecturers, Educationists, Examiners,

Just before you leave for your well-deserved summer holidays, we would like to update you on the latest activities of the FAB – Formative Assessment Benchmarking for Foreign Language Learning & Teaching project run at the University of Warsaw Centre for Foreign Language Teaching. We have recently been quite busy conducting final questionnaires, disseminating the project, taking part in an international meeting, and getting ready for our conference in September. We hope you might be interested in what exactly has been accomplished so far.

Our final survey on formative assessment addressed to university students and teachers was conducted between March 26th and April 30th, 2017.  If you are interested in the questionnaires and their results, please click here. We are really pleased that so many respondents (76%) have expressed their appreciation of the role of formative assessment in learning and teaching foreign languages, while most of them (70%) have found formative assessment an effective educational instrument. We would like to thank all students and teachers who have been involved in the survey.

To promote the project and the idea of formative assessment we participated in the following conferences:

– „Speaking in a foreign language: From controlled production to spontaneous communication”, State Higher Vocational School in Konin (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa w Koninie),   8 – 10  May 2017 – conference programme;

–  The 3rd European Language Congress ‘Innovation, Inspiration, Culture’ organised by  the PASE (Polish Association for Standards in Language Education), at the University of Warsaw, 12-14 May 2017;

– „4th International Conference: Sustainable Multilingualism 2017”, Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, 26 – 28 May 2017 – the programme is available here;

In addition, in all partner countries who have been involved in the FAB project, several publications on formative assessment have been issued. The list is here.

On June 16, 2017 we took part in an international meeting at the University of Pecs, Hungary, together with other representatives from partner universities, where we summed up our activities including lesson observations, workshops, dissemination events and activities, and discussed the results of the final survey. We also agreed on the latest details concerning our publication on formative assessment and the September conference.

Would you believe that during the course of the project almost 200 lesson observations were conducted, and 750 students and 84 teachers from all partner universities responded to our final questionnaire?

The meeting in Pecs was very constructive, and we all appreciated friendly and cordial atmosphere created by our hosts. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the Pecs team for their hospitality and their contribution to the project.

Please be reminded that the FAB conference is going to be held on September 19th at the University of Warsaw. The list of plenary speakers includes:

1. Grażyna Czetwertyńska, Artes Liberales Faculty,  Warsaw University;
2. Jon Hird, University of Oxford,
3. Jo Lewkowicz, London King’s College;
4. Grzegorz Śpiewak, Macmillan Education.

Conference speakers include also persons involved in the FAB project who come from each partner HE institution, as well as formative assessment enthusiasts from other centres. A detailed conference programme will be published soon. We do hope the readers of our newsletter have already registered for our conference and will enjoy participating in the event.

The next newsletter will be published in September. 

With warm regards,

FAB team – University of Warsaw