Assessment for learning in teacher education: the development of a diagnostic language test for trainee teachers of French

The motivation and rationale for this project stemmed from concerns about standards of subject knowledge in trainee French teachers during a one-year PGCE course.

These concerns relate to students’ overall language proficiency and particularly to key areas of grammar lexis and orthography that successive cohorts of students have found difficult. An important factor is whether trainees have sufficient depth of explicit knowledge to teach rules explain and correct pupils’ errors and understand why learners make such errors.