The teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language has increased in importance in the latest years and it became an urgent matter for research to embark on investigating the processes taking place in these classrooms. Although it is of common knowledge that the teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language can be inserted alongside other specific contexts of teaching under the umbrella field of Portuguese as a Foreign Language, the Host context brings its specificities to the discussion of how to teach and evaluate language learning, which has not been addressed by the broader area yet (JENSEN, 2002[1]; LOPES, 2009[2]; DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018[3]).

Among the specificities brought by the teaching of Portuguese as a Host language is a necessity for specialized teachers, for personalized teaching materials (SILVEIRA; XHAFAJ, 2020[4]), and consequently for adequate techniques and methods for analyzing the language development of the speakers in this context. These aspects have to be coherent with the students’ context of learning and, primarily, with their learning objectives. However, the tradition in the field of language learning, concerning the evaluation of language development has been strongly connected to standardized tests that look mainly at structural elements of language which might not be the most appropriate approach to the Host Language context – though some important changes have happened in the recent years (LONG, 2015[5]), with the advance of proficiency tests and scales that are more function-oriented instead of grammar-based.

Teaching Portuguese as a Host Language (PHL) involves understanding that the population in focus is composed of immigrants and refugees that have been forcibly displaced1 from their home countries and are looking for establishing in Brazil for a new life. Therefore, the immediate needs of this population concerning language learning should consider the situations of immediate adaptation to the ways of living in the new country (GROSSO, 2010[6]). In this matter, research in the field has lacked a careful consideration of how to prepare and evaluate language performance considering these populations’ immediate communication needs.

Having in mind this context’s needs for tailored syllabuses that meet the population’s communication needs and, consequently, evaluates their performance accordingly, this study aims at presenting an alternative way of assessing students' oral performance in tasks in the context of PHL for beginners in Brazil. We aim at assessing students’ oral performance not through the well-known CALF measures but adopting the measure of Outcome Achievement (based on FARIAS, 2018[7]), which is a multifaceted construct, that does not rely solely on vocabulary use, or grammatical accuracy, for instance, but instead has a strong concern for meaning and contextual elements that may dictate the adequacy of the vocabulary or grammar to be used. This article reports on the process of designing and implementing two oral tasks, and two descriptive scales for Outcome Achievement which were, in turn, designed to meet the characteristics of these two oral tasks.

This article is organized as follows. First, we present an overview of the fields of Portuguese as a Host Language and the traditions in evaluating oral language performance in tasks. Then, we describe the method employed to gather data for the study, focusing on the population’s characteristics and the steps followed to first, implement the two tasks in a classroom setting; second, design the two Outcome Achievement descriptive scales; and finally, implement it for analyzing the participants’ oral performances. To conclude, we bring the results of the performances in the two tasks and suggest further steps to investigate the measure.

In order to analyze the proposal of a recently conceptualized measure, as is the Outcome Achievement, it is key to look at the traditions in research that have been using different measures to analyze performance, and specifically, in this case, oral language performance. To do so, it is important to look at performance having in mind the context of teaching and learning to which the measure is being proposed here. Therefore, this section is organized to, first, bring an overview of the context of Portuguese learning and teaching as a Host Language; and second, present the background of studies that inform the analyses of oral language performance.

The concept of Host Language has been frequently addressed by some researchers (GROSSO, 2010[6]; LOPEZ, 2018[8]; OLIVEIRA; SILVA, 2017[9]) to debate the recent migration movements taking place in all parts of the world. Although migration has been a common phenomenon throughout the history of humanity, some would say that the last years could be subscribed as “the biggest migration crisis of all times” (DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018, p. 3228[3], our translation). According to the United Nations High Commissionaire for Refugees’ (UNHCR[10]) 2018 report, 68.5 million people around the world had been recently forced from their homes, which, according to the report, represents the highest levels of displacement on record ever witnessed. Moreover, also according to UNHCR, about 85% of the world’s displaced people are in developing countries, such as Brazil.

As a consequence, this growing number of immigrants who have seen Brazil as an alternative place in which they can rebuild their lives has caused important changes in the profile of the population in need to speak Portuguese. The urge to understand the specificities of this population has been growing and it has shown the field’s need for language teaching and learning practices that fit this population best. It has been perceived that the tools available, usually used for the teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language, do not fit this population’s communication needs in the first moments of welcoming in the new country (DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018[3]).

The need to develop initiatives to assist the immigrants in the societies to which they move is urgent, once the situation of forcibly displaced people highlights necessities related to legal affairs, housing and working issues, and even more urgent matters nowadays such as access to the health systems, taking into consideration the COVID-19 pandemic. And in all these matters, language is a key aspect that may help or hinder the adaptation of forcibly displaced people to their new home.

In this context, speaking Portuguese is not only a matter of being proficient in interacting with native speakers of the target language in diverse situations; it is a matter of being proficient in solving particular and immediate necessities. According to Grosso (2010[6]), the Host Language concept is linked to the host context and the migratory context. It is generally composed by an adult audience, who might learn Portuguese “due to different contextual needs, often linked to the resolution of urgent survival issues, in which the host language has to be the link of affective (bidirectional) interaction as the first form of integration (in linguistic immersion) to a full democratic citizenship” (GROSSO, 2010, p. 74, our translation[6]).

Arantes, Brenner and Deusdará (2016) also highlight the idea that the “teaching of a host language to refugee youths and adults presents specificities that are not the same as those of foreign language teaching” (p. 1202 apud DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018, p. 3229[3], our translation) and due to this fact, many of the traditional approaches to teaching and learning a language might not consider aspects that are crucial to this context. One example is the fact that this population might not aim at developing the most accurate speaking skills in the short term, but instead might aim to learn enough Portuguese that could guarantee effective communication in the city hall, with the Federal Police department, with health professionals and other situations that are of an immediate necessity to them (MARCELINO, 2020[11]).

Accordingly, teachers and researchers should find alternatives to prepare the learners of Portuguese as a host language to perform in these situations and to assess their performances in order to develop their oral skills globally, but also giving special attention to those specific communication needs.

In this aspect, we have seen a growing number of studies that have addressed the teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language, presenting options of practices that allow for a focus on the communication needs of this population, as is the case of studies in the field of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) (SILVEIRA; XHAFAJ, 2020[4]; MARCELINO, 2020[11]; LOPEZ, 2016[12]; 2018[8]; CURSINO; ALBUQUERQUE; FIGUEIREDO SILVA; GABRIEL; ANUNCIAÇÃO, 2016[13], to cite a few recent studies).

What we need to know about TBLT now, considering the purposes of this article, is that at its core is the idea that people use language to plan, perform and recall the activities done in the “real-world” (LONG, 2015[5]) – meaning the world outside the classroom walls. The language classroom, therefore, assumes this functional perspective for the use of language bearing in mind the communicative purpose/objective of the interactions that take place in the everyday life. According to Long (2015[5]), the tasks are the units of “analysis throughout the design, implementation, and evaluation” (p. 6) of a language course, and consequently, its evaluation should be coherent to the kind of tasks students are required to perform in class and, at the same time, outside the classroom.

Moving on to looking at oral tasks in the field of TBLT, there has been a preference for analyzing performance through what is called the CALF measures (which stand for Complexity, Accuracy, Lexical density, and Fluency) (FOSTER; SKEHAN, 1996[14]; PALLOTTI, 2009[15]; SKEHAN, 1996, 1998, 2003[16-18]). These measures are applied to analyze oral performance usually by means of transcribed speech and computer programs in charge of the counting of subordination in the sentences, number of errors per clause, number and variety of words used, and number of pauses and false starts, to cite a few possibilities. However, some recent studies have questioned the idea that to perform successfully in an oral task the speech produced has to be complex, accurate, lexically rich, and fluent (REVESZ; EKIERT; TORGERSEN, 2016[19]). More specifically, research that has had its onset in pedagogical contexts has focused on the learners’ immediate communication needs and has claimed that to perform tasks successfully, one’s main concern is to communicate the message and fulfill that need regardless of some violation of the language rules that might appear in these learners’ speeches.

In this sense, the pragmatic aspects of language play a more important role in the communication – and consequently in the performance – than the structural elements of language, such as the adequate use of grammar. We understand that these pragmatic elements are related to the “conditions governing the language use, the linguistic practice” (FIORIN, 2003, p.161[20], our translation) and how these conditions affect the linguistic choices made by learners. In our point of view, the pragmatic elements of the enunciation are not captured by the CALF measures, such as the people, the time, and the space in which the communication happens. Therefore, there is a need to investigate other assessment tools that consider these aspects when determining communicative success, for instance.

In the field of TBLT, Pallotti (2009[15]), as well as Robinson (2001[21]), have already highlighted the fact that communicative success and adequate communication have been little investigated in the field and, consequently, suggestions of alternative measures have been put under scrutiny, such as adequacy and outcome achievement.

The measures of adequacy and outcome achievement are known to assess language performance taking into consideration the context in which the language is being used and the interlocutors the speech addresses, for instance. According to Farias (2018[7]), both constructs are very similar and may overlap depending on the nature of the task to which it is applied. Pallotti (2009[15]) states that Adequacy “represent[s] the degree to which a learners’ performance is more or less successful in achieving the task’s goals efficiently" (p. 596), while Farias (2018[7]) explains that “differently from Adequacy, that puts attention on examining if language was used adequately for communicative purposes, Outcome Achievement is focused on investigating if the expected outcome of a task was accomplished” (p. 69, our emphasis).

Adequacy and outcome achievement are constructs that place an important part of successful communication in conveying the appropriate genre of communication that the tasks require, by agreeing with the contexts in which the tasks are inserted, for instance. And, due to the fact that contexts of language use entail different aspects of language production, the alternative to assess performance in these terms is to adopt descriptive scales (PALLOTTI, 2009[15]) tailored to the tasks learners are required to perform and that consider the pragmatic components of language in use (FIORIN, 2003[20]).

Pallotti (2009[15]) explains that one example of measure scales to rate language production is the well-known Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment, that “presents a comprehensive descriptive scheme of language proficiency and a set of Common Reference Levels (A1 to C2) defined in illustrative descriptor scales…” (COUNCIL OF EUROPE, 2020, p. 27[22]). And in the Brazilian context, there is the Exam for the Certification of Proficiency in Portuguese (CELPE-BRAS), which claims to be “based on the idea of proficiency as the adequate use of language to conduct actions in the world. The exam considers textual elements and, mainly, discoursive elements: the context, the purpose and interlocutors involved in the interaction.” (MINISTÉRIO DA EDUCAÇÃO, n/d, our translation[23]).

Although the descriptions of the measures of adequacy and outcome achievement resemble CELPE-BRAS’s idea of proficiency, the oral part of the exam presents limitations for assessing learners in the host language context of learning. The main limitation being represented, in our point of view, by the fact that the only genre of language use available to assess oral performance in the exam is to have a conversation or interaction2 about a topic chosen by the interlocutor-evaluator.

Our experience, as language teachers and researchers has shown that immediate beginners are not yet equipped with the language proficiency necessary to maintain a five-minute conversation about a topic they might not be acquainted with. And that the descriptive scale designed to assess oral performance according to this genre in the exam, might not be the best fit to assess performance according to the immediate communicative needs of learners in the context of the host language. In this context, equipping the learners to perform in specific focused-tasks might be more urgent. In order to illustrate, we can think of the learners being able to communicate the symptoms of a disease to a health professional, as a task that is very urgent for learners in the context of the host language.

We understand that every proficiency test presents limitations and are designed with different objectives in mind, and that the descriptive scales provided by the tests are many times used to guide curriculum development and even to guide teachers’ choices in language classrooms. Therefore, considering the latter, scales such as CELPE-BRAS and CEFR present a comprehensive description on how to assess performance, and might not be a straightforward source for teachers designing and implementing their assessments in the classroom setting of Portuguese as a host language, specially for beginner learners who need to fulfill their immediate communication needs, irrespective of making language mistakes.3

Having considered the different approaches to analyze oral performance in the field of Task-Based Language Teaching, the following section describes the steps involved in the data collection and instruments this article presents.

In order to report the process of assessing students' oral performance in the context of PHL for beginners in Brazil, by adopting the measure of Outcome Achievement (based on FARIAS, 2018[7]), a construct developed in the field of Task-Based Language Teaching that looks at the adequate performance in a task through a pragmatic perspective, in this section, first we describe the context of teaching at which the oral tasks were aimed and follow by presenting the steps taken to create the two scales of Outcome Achievement. Then, we present the procedures for the implementation of the measure to analyze these students’ oral performances4.

First of all, we present the context of teaching on which this study focuses, which comprises a group of students (17 in total) beginner speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, who were immigrants living in Florianópolis – Santa Catarina around the first semester of 2019 and who had just started taking language classes at an extension project of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), entitled Projeto PLAM.5

This group of learners was composed of one Iranian, one Jordanian, two Venezuelans, and 13 Haitian immigrants. The group is far from being considered homogenous, once they vary in sex (10 men, 7 women), nationality (Iranian, Jordanian, Venezuelan, and Haitian), and mainly in age range (18 to 76 years old), schooling (a few learners have college degrees, while some others have not completed secondary school) and language backgrounds (while a few students were monolinguals, others spoke two or three languages)6.

PLAM project offers classes once-a-week, for three hours, on Saturday mornings. The classes are free of charge for the students and count on the participation of volunteer teachers and teacher assistants. The project usually offers one class for immediate beginner speakers and one class for students who are higher-beginners to intermediate speakers of Portuguese.

The data collection reported in this article took place in two of those classes, in which students were presented to two cycles of tasks, as part of their regular language classes. Therefore, in the first class, the students participated in the class regularly and performed pedagogical pre-tasks designed to prepare students to perform the final target task (Figure 1). Not all the students present in the class accepted to participate in the study and some did not complete the activities in class, which was a requirement to have their performance included in the analysis7. This explains why the number of participants is different in the two tasks, once data collection took place in a real classroom setting, the researchers had to rely on students’ attendance and their agreement to participate in the lessons’ activities and, finally, with students’ willingness to record their answers.

The cycles of tasks to which the students were presented before the recording tasks were designed taking into consideration the students’ goals for Portuguese language use in their daily-lives outside school8 and aimed at preparing these students to perform adequately in the final target tasks.

The first task required students to identify three different images of the flu symptoms and record their answers to the task (with their phones or with an audio recorder provided by the researcher9). The rubrics of the task were: “Daniel chegou no Brasil há uma semana e ainda não fala português. Ele está doente e você vai com ele ao posto de saúde. Explique para o enfermeiro os sintomas de Daniel.”; as presented in FIGURE 1.