Welcome to SELF

Aperçu du player SELF

Formative Language Assessment System

SELF is a widely used language placement test in France. It is the result of an interdisciplinary and intercultural team of nearly 80 people at UGA, working within the framework of IDEFI Innovalangues (ANR-11-IDFI-0024, 2012–2020).

SELF aims to address a national demand for formative assessment by providing a multilingual test, research-based, evaluating three skills: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and short written expression. The test takes approximately one hour to complete.

SELF aperçu

Today, SELF is available in six languages: English, Spanish, French as a foreign language, Italian, Japanese, and Mandarin. Since 2017, it has been administered more than 300,000 times across around forty institutions in France.

 

Objectives

However, SELF is not limited to serving as a placement tool. It also seeks to innovate institutional assessment practices in France and beyond by fostering dialogue between language sciences and statistics applied to psychometrics. Specifically, in terms of transformative effects for teaching, SELF:

  • meets real institutional needs (assessing a large number of students) and logistical constraints for test administration;
  • offers cross-linguistic coherence within a multilingual training framework;
  • supports pedagogy through level-based and skill-specific grouping.

SELF was designed in accordance with the core principles of Language Testing: Validity, Reliability, Equality, and Fairness.

On the learning side, SELF was designed to:

  • Raise learner awareness (of their strengths, weaknesses, and progress);
  • Support metacognitive activity (reflection on perceived difficulty);
  • Foster autonomy (knowing oneself better to self-direct more effectively);
  • Lay the groundwork for learning profiles;
  • Synergize with learning pathways.
Published on  December 12, 2024
Updated on March 17, 2025