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Language
Language is the one of the most important tools we use to learn. While English is a common language of instruction in Pacific schools, there are hundreds of Pacific languages and the language that students use at home is not always the language they use at school. For example, in some Cook Island schools, the year four assessments were administered in Cook Island Maori and the year six in English, while in nine other schools PILNA was administered in English across both year levels. The language that students took the PILNA assessments in may not have been the language most familiar to them.
Taking assessments in a language that is not a student’s most familiar language may affect their performance. This is important to consider, as the PILNA assessments aim to assess student performance independently from any one language – literacy and numeracy can be demonstrated using any Pacific language. Therefore, the PILNA programme takes into account the language students used to complete their assessments relative to the languages they are most familiar with.
Students were asked about the language they mostly used to converse with family, friends, teachers, and in other settings. This was recorded alongside the language the student used to sit the PILNA assessments. With this information, a regional scale was formed to describe how much a student used the language they completed the PILNA assessments in.
Higher scores on this language scale indicate that the student uses the language that they completed the PILNA assessment with for conversing across a greater range of settings. Lower scores indicate that the student uses the language they completed the PILNA in for conversing across fewer settings.
This scale allowed for comparisons between student performance and the number of settings the students use the language they completed the PILNA assessments in Figure STF1.1 shows differences in average language scale scores by year level, domain (numeracy and reading), and by meeting or not meeting expected (benchmarked) performance in each domain for students from Cook Islands. Note that comparisons to the writing domain are unavailable, as the proficiency scale for writing (benchmarks) has not yet been established.
Numeracy
Year 4
- 226 4.8
- 233 3.5
Year 6
- 216 7.5
- 233 3.2
Reading
Year 4
- 226 5
- 235 3.6
Year 6
- 212 8.8
- 232 3.2
- Scale score for students below expected proficiency level
- Scale score for students at or above expected proficiency level
- Statistically significant correlation (p <0.05)
- Standard errors appear in parentheses
Language and numeracy performance
When looking at language scale scores by numeracy performance, the results were the same across both year levels. Students whose main language of conversing was the same as the language of PILNA tended to perform better across the two achievement domains than did students whose language of conversing was different from the language of assessment.
Year four students who met the expected level of numeracy performance had slightly higher average language scale scores (233) than year four students who did not meet the expected level of numeracy performance (226). Year six students saw a similar effect for numeracy performance. Year six students who met the expected level of numeracy performance had higher average language scale scores (233) than year six students who did not meet the expected level of numeracy performance (216).
When looking at regional language scale scores by numeracy performance, the results differ between year levels. For the region, there was no difference between the average language scale scores for year six students who met expected levels of numeracy performance and the year six students who did not. There was a slight difference, however, for year four students. Those who met the expected level of numeracy performance had slightly higher average language scale scores (202) than year four students who did not (198). It appears that year four students who met the expected level of numeracy performance used the language they completed PILNA in more commonly to converse.
Language and reading performance
For language scores by reading performance, both year levels show similar results. Year four students who met the expected level of reading performance had slightly higher average language scores (235) than year four students who did not (226). Similarly, year six students who met the expected level of reading performance had slightly higher average language scores (232) than year six students who did not (212).
For both year four and year six students, those who met expected levels of performance in reading used the language they completed PILNA in to converse in more settings than those who did not meet the expected levels of performance.
What does this mean?
Interestingly, but perhaps intuitively, students who performed better in reading tended to use the language they were assessed with in more settings. This suggests that using a language in everyday conversation may improve students’ reading ability.
The comparisons for numeracy paint a similar picture. Students who performed better in numeracy tended to use the language they were assessed with in more settings. This suggests that using a language in everyday conversation may improve students’ numeracy ability.
