Assessment of university students' English grammar proficiency in terms of CEFR criterial achievement levels: The case of Lithuanian university of educational sciences

Abstract

Alignment of language teaching and learning with the CEFR is a complicated process. One of the steps in this process is the analysis and evaluation of student performances characteristic of one or another achievement level (Council of Europe, 2018). The current paper focuses on the exploration of university students' English grammar proficiency in terms of CEFR proficiency levels. However, CEFR levels are underspecified with respect to key properties that are tested and assessed by FL teachers and examiners when they assign a learner a particular proficiency level. Therefore, the Cambridge English Profile Programme is employed for a more detailed analysis, as it outlines criterial features for all CEFR proficiency levels. Hence, the present study aims at investigating to what extent the list of grammatical criterial features proposed by the English Profile Programme (EPP) at the University of Cambridge is applicable to students of English Philology in their final year of BA studies when defining their proficiency level according to the CEFR. The findings of the study suggest that Lithuanian students of English Philology tend to make do with a restricted repertoire of grammatical structures which mainly range from level B1 to B2. The author of the paper does not wish to extend the obtained results to the national scale, yet strongly believes that the findings might shed light on and reveal major tendencies in the development of foreign language proficiency of English Philology students in Lithuania.