The European Survey on Language Competences: measuring foreign language student proficiency

The European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC) was designed to collect information about the foreign language proficiency of students in the last year of lower secondary education or the second year of upper secondary education in participating European educational systems. The intention was not only to carry out a survey of language competences, but a survey that should be able to deliver information about language learning, teaching methods and curricula. It was fundamental to contextualize the data, and thus questionnaires to principals, teachers and students were implemented in order to complement the language tests. The ESLC measured the proficiency of approximately 54 000 students across 16 educational systems in 14 participating countries. In each of the educational systems the two most commonly taught foreign languages of the five official languages of the European Union (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) were tested. Students' language proficiency is described in terms of the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference, to enable comparison across participating educational systems. The data collected allows characterizing foreign language learning and teaching practices and identifying school variables that can influence students' proficiency. In this paper we propose to (i) briefly present the ESCL as well as the contextual questionnaires applied to principals, teachers and students, and (ii) discuss the main findings and conclusions of the survey and of the secondary analysis performed by the Centre for Research on Education and Lifelong Learning (CRELL). The ESLC data adds considerably to the knowledge base that was previously available at European level or from official national statistics.