Quality and inequality in the assessment of visual literacy in Grade 12 examination papers across six South African languages

Abstract

In promoting equality across South Africa's 11 official languages, the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) has established a common language curriculum and common guidelines for the high-stakes, Grade 12, National Senior Certificate (NSC) or school-exiting examination. This article examines the summative assessment of the visual literacy (VL) component of the home language examination papers in six dominant languages – Afrikaans, English, Sesotho, Sepedi, isiXhosa and isiZulu – for the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. It demonstrates that in spite of common curricula and examination guidelines, the assessment of VL across the languages lacks equivalence in terms of text selection; quality of questions for both technical knowledge and critical language awareness; and cognitive level demands. The article concludes by arguing that an examination guideline policy is inadequate for establishing equality of assessment across languages and that other significant dynamics must be addressed, if the desired outcome of ‘equality’ across language examinations is to be achieved.

Keywords:

• assessment
• cognitive levels
• critical language awareness
• fairness in testing
• language equivalence
• text choices
• visual literacy
• washback