Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter VI Assessing Speaking

Assessing Speaking can be divided by the purpose. In daily life is an important mean of communication, give and receive messages, communicate. In academic programs is focused on presentations of information. In business English the focus is on telephone, customer services skills, make reports or interact in meetings. Depending on the program , the assessment must reflect the course objectives.

Speaking is a complex skill that also depends on other skills such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The main issue when assessing speaking is the time consuming when applying the test individually for large groups.

The following considerations must be taken in to account when designing assessment tasks for speaking: choose tasks that generate positive washback for teaching and learning, these tasks should be authentic as possible, allow time for warm up, keep skill contamination in mind, large samples of language are more reliable, use a range of appropriate techniques, ensure reliable scoring by choosing appropriate scales, train teachers in scoring, personalize the test using students’ names, never mark the test in front of the students.

The following techniques for assessment speaking are commonly used and  finding an appropriate scale for scoring each one is a must: oral presentations, debates, reading aloud, retelling stories, verbal essays and extemporaneous speaking.

Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter V Assessing Listening

As reading, listening is an invisible and interactive skill, again bottom up and top down processes are involve actively constructing meaning.  However, this skill has been neglected emphasizing productive skills. There are 3 approaches to listening: discrete point (brakes the listening in to components assessed separately), the integrative approach (like in dictation and cloze tasks, it integrates the components) and the communicative approach (understand the message and use it in context).

Before designing assessment tasks, is important to differentiate academic and general listening.  In  general listening 33 micro skills have been identified, such as: clustering, recognizing, redundancy, comprehending reduced forms and hesitations, pauses, false starts and corrections, understanding colloquial language, processing prosodic features, understanding and using rules of conversation interaction, etc.  For academic listening there are some higher micro skills that include: identifying the purpose of a lecture and its logical development, understand the relationship among discourse units, recognize lexical terms, etc.

It is important to take in to account that in spite of the difficulties of assessing the skill, it has to be assessed. Reading aloud must be changed for real listening texts (conversations for example), give credit for what the students know ( focus on listening comprehension only), give importance to the background knowledge, Focus on meaning, give a purpose for listening, don’t expect full comprehension, use listening task in which reading or writing is done a little, assess all types of listening.

Good techniques assessing listening are: are: phonemic discrimination, paraphrase recognition, objective formats: (Multiple Choice (three options only), T/F, Short Answer, cloze, dictation, information transfer and note taking.

Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter IV Assessing Writing

Writing is a high estimated skill especially by employers and higher education. There are multiple tasks which assess writing focusing on the organization of ideas, clarity of the message and mechanics.  There are two main approaches to writing: the indirect measures of writing assessment more related to accuracy than communication, it assesses punctuation, spelling and sentence construction; and the direct measures of writing assessment that assesses communication based on production, integrating all the elements: grammar, content, vocabulary, conventions and syntax.

Consider giving multiple writing assessment tasks and opportunities to the students and test use them. Contextualize tasks for the students’ needs, mark only what is written, evaluate all answers from one question before continuing with the next. Have a systematic approach for dealing with marking discrepancies, get the students involve in their assessment, provide feedback, practice blind marking, and make the necessary adjustments for the marking criteria by using them in practices. Take in to account that writing is a visible skill, so that, the use of rubrics help the teacher to be more objective when scoring.

Some sample techniques for writing are: free writing and guided writing.  Assessment can be done by the Student-teacher conferences, self-assessment, peer assessment and portfolio-based assessment.

When writing specifications, deal with the selection of the rubrics and criteria for writing scales that includes the selection of holistic (more integrating marks) and analytical (specific purposes for writing) scales and select the benchmarks.

Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter III Assessing Reading

Reading is an invisible and interactive skill. Teachers cannot see what is going on in the mind of the students while reading. It gives it a difficult to assess connotation. However, there are a variety of sub skills that can help to assess the reading abilities. On the other hand, it’s interactive because while reading, students think on possibilities, search in their background knowledge, guess and construct meaning.

 For reading purposes, bottom up and top down process are needed among other approaches to reading that help to make it more efficiently.  In addition there are some sub skills that make reading a skill easier to assess: skimming, scanning, read for main ideas, fact and opinion, information transfer, drawing inferences, understanding vocabulary, sentences, understanding meaning. Some considerations when assessing reading have to be taken: the assessment has to match the reading program, use sample of reading sub skills with different tasks types that at the same time have to be selected from a range, nonlinear and prose texts must be used, authenticity must be used as much as possible, the entire text must be exploited, grammar and vocabulary must be included in context, grammar and vocabulary are focused as sub skills, critical thinking and inferencing must be encouraged and assessed, timing should be considering when skimming and scanning.

Some recommendable tasks when assessing reading are: questions, they must be slightly lower than the reading passage, with the same order as the information in the text. Cloze tests for specific vocabulary. Multiple choice and true/false tasks are ideal for main ideas and supporting details, short answer tasks such as scanning focus on main idea or details.

Assessing English Language Learners


Introduction

*What is the meaning of  evaluation assessment, and testing? Evaluation refers to the whole process of teaching-learning. It involves course syllabus, activities and testing. Assessment refers to the possible activities and instruments that a teacher selects in order to check the progress of the students in the learning process.  Finally, testing is a category of the assessment and it’s “a procedure” to obtain measurable results from the teaching-learning process.

Chapter I

*Assessment tasks are designed for that purpose, and the teacher must select the ones that best fulfills the needs according to the context: placement, aptitude, diagnostic, progress, achievement and proficiency tests are the most common categories. However, there are other categorizations such as: objective versus subjective tests, Criterion-Referenced versus Standardized tests, Summative versus formative, High stakes versus low stakes tests. There are nine principles that heads good test design: usefulness (intended use), validity (content, construct and face), reliability (application time-score relation), practicality, wash back (effect of testing), Authenticity, Transparency (accurate info) and Security.

Chapter II

*The process of developing assessment starts with planning, development, administration, analysis, feedback and reflection. It is very important to work in the specifications and students’ preparation. The techniques for testing includes the type of items that are going to be taken in to account when designing a test. It also involves common violations teachers do: grammar mistakes, ambiguous answers and double answer key are very common.