Evaluation in Spanish as a foreign language: paradigms to address written comprehension in proficiency certification exams

Abstract

Proficiency certification exams represent an important instrument of regulation and diffusion of Spanish language (González, 2017) within the historical and social period whither Spanish is considered as a majority language characterized by the diversity of places in which it is spoken, taught, learned and evaluated. This article presents a discursive analysis of reading comprehension tests in three different assessment systems for Spanish as a foreign language (ELE), in order to identify the underlying comprehension paradigms. First, a summary overview of the context of creation of DELE, CELU and SIELE will be presented also with their main characteristics. The fundamental requirements of the exams that guarantee their reliability and international recognition will then be defined. Secondly, we will describe the reading comprehension skill and will present the definition of traditional reading models also within cognitive operations and aspects involved. We will then present two epistemological paradigms or models of comprehension: decoding and inference, both of them conducting different notions of text, language and the comprehension activity itself that have a direct impact on methodological decisions materialized in the tests. Finally, specific tasks of the reading comprehension tests of each international ELE exam will be analyzed, in order to identify underlying theoretical notions in each evaluation system.