Developing and Evaluating Self Assessment Reading Competence Descriptors for the European Language Portfolio

This article describes the studies piloting the self-assessment reading, descriptors to be included in the Academic and Professional European Language Portfolio for engineering and architecture students, accredited by Council of Europe. They were developed considering the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001), Schneider and Lenz's (2001) guidelines, and the teaching experience of ESP teachers of the Technical University of Madrid research group DISCYT. Then, the descriptors were piloted for clarity, relevance and calibration to the CEFRL with 149 architecture and engineering students, from first to senior year. From the results, we found that the descriptors were on the whole relevant, well calibrated and fairly well written. We have detailed non successful descriptors in order to enlighten future calibration studies for ELPs self-assessment checklists, since competence descriptor lists should be kept open to suit students' needs.