An overview of FLE (French as a foreign language) student assessment in Russia reveals the following state of affairs. On the one hand, diplomas DELF-DALF (Diploma in French Language Studies - Diploma in Advanced French Language Studies) and TCF (Test of Knowledge of French) are not officially recognized in Russia. On the other hand, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation proposes two types of certification: the Unified State Examination and the All-Russian Olympiad. The tasks of the latter were conceived in a way to become the interlink between the French language curricula and performance assessment criteria used in Russia and those devised for French and European tests and examinations. In other words, the goal is to create mark schemes and assessment criteria which would correspond to those of DALF-DELF and would conform to the recommendations of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). The present article deals with the All-Russian Olympiad in French (the annual contest organized by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation) from the methodological point of view as inviting pedagogical reflection and experiment, the purpose being to introduce assessment procedures which would fit into the common assessment system already adopted in Europe.

The term “evaluating written language” hides underlying polysemic concepts that this article aims at clarifying from the start. Therefore both the certifying and the formative evaluation of written production will be addressed. The former is doubly institutional: its aim is to give an orientation and a planification of learning writing skills, and also constitutes the basis of the final decision of success or failure. The latter, widely claimed but less widely applied, aims to improve the  learning of the skill during the learning, and is based on diagnostic concepts, and, in coherence with those, on the setting up of permanent actions allowing learners to progress in their learning. These aspects will be illustrated by concrete examples.

School assessment is a systematic procedure which allows enhancing the value of acquired learning as well as giving it meaning.The first challenge is to distinguish between certification evaluation, which aims at probing success in learning, and formative evaluation. This latter is more oriented to improving the acquired learning in itself. This “assessment for learning” can take different forms, depending on the standpoints of the various teachers. A second challenge concerns grasping the evaluation objects: on the one side the knowledge and know-how, and on the other side, the competences needed for their mobilization in order to solve a complex situation.

The establishment and evaluation of annotated resources as well as automatic annotation systems have growing interest in linguistics and NLP. However, evaluation methods are not always well mastered and used, particularly in linguistics, where the sequential nature of textual data requires specific methods. In this article, we first analyze the notions of corpus and annotation in their multiple forms, then focus on the results of the evaluation questions. In particular, we emphasize the difference in nature between the evaluation of an annotation system and the evaluation of manually multi-annotated resources. We provide an overview of existing evaluation tools and their possible use for each of these two cases.

Every year, reading performance of about 700.000 young people is assessed in the framework of a day (JAPD, Journée d'Appel de Préparation à la Défense) organised by the French Ministry of Defense. These tests changed recently due to some constraints of test administration and the taking into account of the results of the previous version of the test. Based on the results collected over the years 2004-2008, this paper presents the methodological design of this large span evaluation of reading. This study is an occasion to moderate the binary oppositions between literate and illiterate, and to show that various more or less efficient ways of reading, characterize this activity. For some young people, the switch from schooling to active professional life implies a new relation with written language. The school, which is the main location of reading and writing solicitation, will be replaced by economical activities. For some young people, the relation with writing will be definitively distended.

Transversal competences define and target knowledge that every human being should develop in school in order to understand the complexity of situations in normal life and act intelligently. However, without anchoring them in concrete situations, the course of development of these competences and their assessment seem to stay rather vague. After defining the concept of competence and sketching the guidelines of competence assessment, the article illustrates the difficulty of influencing critical learning inherent in transversal competence and the necessity of evaluating it. The last part of the article makes suggestions for professionalisation of this activity.