If the period abroad is to be assessed, there has to be a clear understanding of its objectives so that assessment mechanisms can be devised to measure the extent to which they have been achieved. As the LARA report, Learning and Residence Abroad in Practice, has shown, there is a general consensus across language departments that the principal objectives of the period abroad are:

• improved linguistic proficiency;
• increased intercultural awareness and understanding;
• the development of personal qualities such as self-reliance and resilience;
• the development of transferable skills likely to be of use in a career.

Having established the objectives, we can think about the means that can be used to assess the students' competence. Given that it may not be possible to assess all the skills and knowledge we hope the students will acquire during their period abroad, the first step when considering assessment and accreditation is none the less clear.

Once the skills and knowledge that it is hoped the students will develop during the period abroad have been identified and prioritised, tasks have to be devised with clear learning objectives whereby students can demonstrate the extent to which those skills have been acquired and an assessment of the skill acquisition can be made.

A pattern of practice has developed across the sector in which certain activities or types of assignment have become the norms for assessment. Three academic tasks of which students are commonly asked to complete one or more are:

to follow a course of study at a host university;

to write a project/dissertation;

to write a self-evaluation of their period abroad.

Each of these activities or tasks has its merits and its value but equally each has its shortcomings when it comes to providing a proper assessment of the skills and knowledge which, it is widely assumed, students should be acquiring or developing during their period abroad.

Taught Courses Abroad

Following courses at a host university was for many years one of the primary options open to students on their period abroad. Assessment was extremely difficult if not impossible because in many instances students were only admitted to lectures as 'guest' students and were not allowed to take the examinations at the end of the lecture-course. The launching of the ERASMUS programme in 1987 opened up a whole new range of possibilities, including lecture/seminar courses alongside local students and often supplemented by courses specifically for foreign students, the assessment of written assignments and the opportunity to take exams. UK HEIs were happy to take full advantage of the new order.

It is important that students should arrive at their host university with an understanding, albeit theoretical, of the structure and role of the higher education system in the country in which they will temporarily reside and the ways in which the role of "student" and the concept of "student life" are culturally specific.

The ERASMUS/SOCRATES scheme requires students registered at a partner university for a full academic year to follow modules/courses corresponding to 60 ECTS credits. Some UK HEIs allow students complete freedom of choice; others insist that the modules/courses chosen must be linked to the course of study in the home university. There is a considerable range of practice, too, regarding what constitutes evidence of the "satisfactory completion" of the modules/courses chosen acceptable to the home department. It may be a certificate of attendance signed by appropriate staff or proof that the student has taken and/or passed an end of module/course examination.

The Project/Dissertation

The requirement to complete a project during the period abroad is one of the commonest features of modern language degree programmes. An academic, book-based/library-based project is often considered to meet the following objectives of skill development during the period abroad:

• development of linguistic skills, especially comprehension (reading and aural) and writing skills;
• ability to function in an academic environment;
• development of self-management skills;
• development of research skills.

The project as an object of assessment is seen as having a number of advantages. Assuming that all students have had access to a university library, it is possible to make valid comparisons between library-based projects written by students in different locations. There is no a priori reason related to resources why a project prepared in Salamanca will be better/worse than one prepared in Bilbao.

However, the purely book-based project is often seen as posing problems. It could probably, for instance, have been written in a university library in the UK; it may raise the question of the comparability of opportunities for all students; it lacks the element of face-to-face contact with the local community which a project involving "live" research (i.e. interviews) can offer. If the cohort includes students studying at a university and students on work-placements or assistantships, the latter could argue that they would be at a disadvantage if required to submit a library-based project, especially if they were working in a remote area. This is where the advantage of the project based on "live" research becomes apparent: it puts students attached to a university and those on work-placements on an equal footing, especially if it has a local focus. If care is taken with the choice of topic, neither grouping should be at an advantage. Furthermore, this type of project means that the student is obliged to make contact with members of the local population, which can, especially in smaller towns, be a way of starting to construct a social life.

If the students are required to submit a project, they must be clear about what is being asked of them. Some of the information will be purely practical and will include, for example, the length of the project (plus penalties, if any, for going over or under the length specified) and the deadline for submission (plus penalty, if any, for late submission). It should also, however, give an indication of the scope of the project, the relationship between description and analysis and the stylistic and referencing norms to be applied. All this should be set out in the Year Abroad Handbook. As the projects are marked "in house", it should be possible for students, before they leave, to consult projects submitted in past years in order to have a concrete idea of what constitutes a good project.

As with other aspects of the period abroad, it is necessary to ensure that students cannot avoid fulfilling the requirements of the project, as defined by the institution, by claiming that they never received the documentation.

If students are to be asked, through the means of the project, to demonstrate a range of skills, it is important that they be given the opportunity to acquire those skills before they leave or that they be given guidelines as to how they might be acquired once they are abroad. This has proved problematic when students are required to incorporate into their project findings from "live" research. Students are often tempted, and may indeed be required, to conduct surveys (a worthy aspiration) but do not know how to go about it. It is important that they should be aware of the dangers of drawing generalised conclusions from a random survey of individuals and of reading too much significance into impromptu expressions of opinion.

Students are generally allocated a project supervisor. In those institutions where the students are visited while abroad, it should ideally be the student's supervisor who visits her or him. If that is not possible or in cases where students are not visited, there should be a designated member of staff whom they can contact by telephone, email or letter, if they have queries about or problems with their project. It is normal practice for the student to have to obtain approval for the proposed project title either before leaving to go abroad or at least before making any commitment.

Having ensured that the students have received the regulations relating to the writing and submission of a project, that they understand the parameters of the project and that they have the necessary skills to undertake the task, we need to ensure that students and staff have the same understanding about how the project is being assessed. Just as the objectives of the period abroad were prioritised, it is essential to both staff and students that the different aspects of the project to be assessed are identified and prioritised.

Assuming that the project is being written in the target language, is it being assessed for linguistic competence or content or both? If the latter, is one element more important than the other or do they carry equal weighting? How do we assess a project where the student has demonstrated a high level of linguistic competence but where the content is decidedly thin? Or what about the student who has provided substantial content but where the linguistic competence is poor? Should research be separated from content or subsumed within it? Should credit be given for good presentation and/or should students be penalised for poor presentation?

Clearly, these issues - especially the content/language dimension - will probably have arisen before the students went abroad if they write essays in the target language, but they (and we) should not assume that the same weighting prevails for the project as it did for earlier work.

Assuming that we want the students to do as well as they can, and certainly not to fail or do badly as a result of a misunderstanding of what is required of them, it is important to make as explicit as possible what the staff are looking for. To those who feel that this is "spoon-feeding" the students, the point can be made that, if we, the assessors, are clear about what we are looking for, then that information should be shared with the students. It is not "spoon-feeding" to tell the students how their work will be assessed and according to what criteria. An understanding shared between staff and students about what is expected from a student's year/semester abroad project can also help to massively reduce the time spent on marking.

The establishment of a grid listing criteria and the lowest and highest score a student can obtain for each category greatly clarifies the process of marking for the benefit of both staff and students. The advantages are that:

1. it identifies clearly the areas of strength and weakness on a list of criteria which are in the public domain and indeed which the student has had while preparing and writing the project.
2. the marking can be done more quickly. Without such a grid, trying to evaluate the relative weighting of say, language, research skills and content, while marking can be trying and quite demanding.
3. if projects are double-marked (students should be asked to submit two copies), the source of any difference of opinion over the final grade can be quickly and easily identified leading to a focused discussion and, usually, swift resolution.

Work in a Company or as an English-language Assistant

The number of students taking up work-placements in companies has increased markedly in recent years. They join the considerable, though declining, number appointed as English-language assistants in schools abroad to make up a sizeable contingent whose performance in their work could be the subject of formal assessment. The students themselves certainly wish, as a rule, to be given feedback on their performance since they will be keen to include details of the placement in their CV when applying for jobs after graduation. The award of marks improves the students' motivation and, by necessitating the establishment of criteria according to which the marks are allocated, clarifies the learning objectives for the placement.

A report on each assistant is normally submitted by the Headteacher or Head of English to the Ministry of Education of the country in question, often without the knowledge of the assistant and without her or his being able to discuss the year's experience in the context of the performance achieved. In a company, there is often an internal appraisal mechanism and the supervisor may write a report on the student for the company's own records. These reports, however, have to be treated with caution and not assumed to represent a satisfactory assessment procedure in their own right for the purposes of the home department.

The view of a headteacher or of a line-manager is not necessarily wholly appropriate within the context of the assessment of a degree programme. There may be all sorts of factors that affect the fairness of the judgements made and the home institution needs to ensure that it builds in the necessary checks and balances when it comes to considering reports on placements. If an agreement is drawn up between the department and the host company, it should contain a clause explaining the kind of appraisal required for the student, supported by an explanation of the purpose of the placement from the department's point of view, preferably with a standard pro-forma showing the key aspects of the student's performance that need to be assessed.

If performance in a work-placement is to be the subject of a formal assessment, a report from the line-manager is certainly an essential element. However, it must be viewed in the light of the moderation provided by a tutor who has first-hand experience of the company, preferably built up over several years, and an acquaintance with the supervisor gained while visiting the student(s). In the case of an assistantship, the tutor is unlikely to visit the same school more than once, but it should be possible for her or him to exercise judgement in the light of personal experience of the education system as a whole.

Many HEIs have made serious reductions in their schedule of visits to students abroad as a result of financial stringency and one effect has been to make the reports received on student performance in work-placements less useful as the basis of a part of the assessment of the period abroad, since the element of moderation by a tutor is missing.

Oral Proficiency

A number of universities use oral assessment as a part of the assessment of the period abroad. If there is to be an element of oral assessment, it is desirable that it should be carried out at the end of the period abroad in the same way that other units/modules are assessed on their completion and not at the beginning of the following semester. However, such a policy would require an expensive and administratively complex procedure involving either visits abroad by staff or a return to the home institution on the part of the students. The practical alternative is to conduct the oral assessment at or near the beginning of the academic year immediately following the period abroad. The key is to carry out the assessment as early as is practicable.

Oral assessment can be linked to the project by requiring the students to give an oral presentation about their project. The same principles should be applied to oral assessment as to the project, namely:

Oral assessment is desirable but is time-consuming and presents organisational problems if one is dealing with a large cohort. Oral assessment should, wherever possible, involve the participation of the external examiner and oral assessments should be recorded (sound or video).

Experiential Learning

The development of personal qualities, such as self-reliance and the ability to evaluate one's own progress, is widely held to be an important outcome of the period abroad. In the self-assessments produced by language departments for the QA exercise and in the handbooks given to students about to go abroad, such qualities are frequently placed alongside linguistic and intercultural learning as a main objective. On the principle that any objective should be measurable, it follows that this aspect of the period abroad ought to be subject to some kind of assessment.

A self-evaluation report offers the opportunity for such an assessment. The purpose of such a report is to encourage the student to reflect on the learning that has taken place during the period abroad. Learning in this context is taken to refer to language acquisition, learning about the culture and society in which the student is operating, learning to operate in that society and personal development. Thus, the self-evaluation report covers four of the objectives generally accepted as central to the period abroad, namely :

• development of linguistic competence (writing skills);
• development of a greater understanding of another culture;
• development of self-management skills;
• encouragement of personal development.

The student is unlikely to be familiar with the concept of such a report. It is therefore essential that he or she understands the purpose of the self- evaluation report and what the home institution expects from it - content, length, submission date, etc. This information can be given out before departure (a) in the course of a language module, or (b) at a meeting called for students who are going abroad in the next academic year. Explicit and specific guidelines setting out what is involved and what is expected of the student should be included in the Year Abroad Handbook.

As the self-evaluation report is less common than taught courses or the project, examples of what is expected from students in two universities are set out below.

The main advantage of the assignment that culminates in the submission of a self-evaluation report is that it can be given to any student spending time abroad, be he or she at a university, working as language assistant or in an industrial or commercial work-placement. A second positive point identified by students who took part in a survey of students abroad at Middlesex University was that the self-evaluation helped to identify one's strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former and tackle the latter. The exercise can also be explicitly connected to the question of career awareness and preparation.

On the negative side, some colleagues have expressed the reservation that it is not "academic" enough. It is true that the self-evaluation exercise emphasises the importance of the process and not just the product; it is true that traditionally students are assessed on the product (the essay, the dissertation, the translation, etc). Unless there is suspicion of plagiarism, relatively little attention is paid to the process. But the highlighting of the dimensions of the personal and the process does not mean that the report is not a valid academic product. The criteria by which the report is assessed are "academically respectable" (linguistic competence/clarity, coherence/structure, ability to reflect, etc) and the self-evaluation report can give the student an important insight into her or his academic and personal development and approaches to learning which are effective for him/her.