Unit 15 Assessment in Language Teaching Aims of

Unit 15 Assessment in Language Teaching

Aims of the Unit • 1. What is assessment? How is it different from evaluation and testing? • 2. The purpose of assessment • 3. The methods of assessment • 4. The criteria for assessment • 5. The principles for assessment • 6. Tests in language assessment

I. What is assessment? • Assessment involves the collecting of information or evidence of a learner’s learning progress and achievement over a period of time for the purposes of improving teaching and learning. It is not based on one test or one task, nor is it expressed by a mark or grade, but rather in a report form with scales or levels as well as description and comment from the teacher. • Assessment can be done through many ways and methods of information gathering, formal and informal, at different times and in different contexts.

II. Assessment Purpose • Simply speaking, assessment in ELT means to discover what the learners know and can do at a certain stage of the learning process based on a collection of information. • All the people involved in education have some reasons to consider assessment necessary. • However, more often, the problems with assessment are not with its purpose but with the aspect of its nature, that is, methods, criteria, principles and feedback, etc.

II. Assessment Purpose The people involved in education have some reasons to consider assessment necessary: • Administrators need to know whether the programmes they have planned are working well. • Teachers need to know what has been done and what needs to be done next • Parents value the feedback about their children’s performance from the teachers and the school. • Students need to know what they have accomplished, be aware of what they need to work on next and build up their confidence from what they have achieved.

What is testing? • Testing often takes the ‘ pencil and paper’ form and it is usually done at the end of a learning period, for example at the end of a two months’ learning, half a term’s learning, a whole semester’s learning or at the end of a whole programme. The result is often expressed by a mark, grade or a ratio. Students’ test scores are compared with each other and sometimes ranked for selection purposes.

What is evaluation? • Evaluation, according to Cameron (2001: 222), can be concerned with “ a whole range of issues in and beyond language education: lessons, courses, programs, and skills can all be evaluated. ” It involves making an overall judgment about one’s work or a whole school’s work. It produces a global view of achievement usually based on many different types of information.

III. Assessment Methods • Testing • Teacher’s observations (Teacher’s subjective estimate of the learners’ overall performance by • observing in class and looking at their work) • Continuous assessment • Self-assessment and peer assessment • Project work • Portfolios

• What kind of things can be included in a portfolio? • (p. 254)

How to assess portfolios? • Smith (2002) has suggested the following be included as the criteria for assessing pupil’s portfolios. • Inclusion of all the required entries • Quality of final revisions • Depth of reflections • Layout and design • Keeping to the time schedule

IV. Assessment Criteria 1. Criterion-referenced assessment Criterion-referenced language assessment is based on a fixed standard or a set criterion. 2. Norm-referenced assessment is designed to measure how the performance of a particular student or group of students compares with the performance of another student or group of students whose scores are given as the norm. 3. Individual-referenced assessment is based on how well the learner is performed relative to his or her own previous performance.

Assessment criteria (The 2 nd type) • • Diagnostic evaluation Formative evaluation Summative evaluation Advantages and disadvantages of different assessments • --Task 7

V. Assessment Principles • • • Assess authentic use of language in reading, speaking, listening and writing; Assess literacy and language in a variety of contexts; Assess the environment, the instruction, and the students; Assess processes as well as products; Analyse patterns of errors in language and literacy;

• Be based on normal developmental patterns and behaviour in language and literacy acquisition; • Clarify and use standards when assessing reading, writing and content knowledge; • Involving students and parents, as well as other personnel in the assessment process; • Be an ongoing part of every day.

V. Testing in Assessment • Features: • -- one of the different ways to collect information; • -- a single-occasion, unidimensional, timed exercise; • -- usually in multiple choice or short-answer form; formal and standardized. • Drawbacks: • • • Not a fair sample of the learner’s overall proficiency; Tend to fragment skills; Test only lower-order thinking skills; Cause negative backwash; Fail to tell where exactly the student failed.

V. Testing in Assessment • Types of test formats • • • Questions and answers True or false questions Multiple-choice questions Gap-filling completion Matching questions Dictation Transformation Translation Essay writing Interview

Questions: • 1. What are the assessment methods to gather information? • 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of different assessment criteria? • 3. Why is formative assessment important in language teaching and learning? • 4. How do you think about testing as assessment?