ABSTRACT
Nowadays, operating in an educational system whose boundaries are defined by a curricular framework and explicit assessment criteria, it is easy to assume that the situation was ever thus. The multiple factors of assessment are now considered so important that they have their own acronym: MARRA (monitoring, assessment, recording, reporting and accountability). Even in adult education-where students traditionally take an evening class in a foreign language for holidays, work purposes or just for fun-assessment has taken on a new importance since LEAs allocate funding for a part-time class only if it is linked to accreditation (Ainslie and Lamping, 1995:1; Hawkins, 1996:55). All school curriculum subjects feel the impact of this assessmentdriven education system, though MFL assessment displays a few particular characteristics and challenges. In 1990 Thorogood pointed out how assessment took on particular importance now that study of an MFL was, for the first time, to be compulsory for all pupils in the 11-16 age range:
We teach in a climate in which the pupil and the parent alike want to know what we are doing and why. This is not peculiar to modern languages, but we do teach a subject in which British learners have been notoriously unsuccessful and in which aims and methodology have been widely misunderstood. We are about to (in 1990) teach to all 14-16 year olds a subject which less than half of their predecessors continued with after age 14 and less than a third of their parents ever studied at all.
