It is important to select the type of test tasks the students are going to deal with in the test. 

http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/choosing-and-devising-test-tasks

Assesing English Lenguage Learners

Administering Assessment

Chapter VIII

      Create a positive attitude toward testing: use test to motivate students telling them that their results help them to learn.

      Be transparent: Explain what is the test and the results for.

      Follow proctoring instructions or instructions in the test manual to the letter: for results to be interpreted meaningfully, a test must be administered under standard conditions.

      Prepare policies and procedures well in advance: make sure that everyone involved is aware of policies and procedures.

      Explain to the students the distinction between teaching and testing: group and pair work activities are important in teaching, in testing the mail goal is to assess individually.

      Refrain from helping students who are having difficulty: It’s mainly because it’s not fair for students who have prepared sufficiently.

      Note unexpected events that might interfere with assessment: take into consideration special issues that can affect when interpreting information for the test.

      Adopt special needs assessment policy: It’s a must.

      Inform students of consequences of academic dishonesty: explain the consequences of cheating and the institution policy about it.

      Minimize the opportunities of  cheating and plagiarism.

Assessing English Language Learners

Ten Things to Remember About Student Test-Taking Skills

Chapter VII

      Student test-taking skills are really good skills: think on teaching and testing working together to build better language skills.

      Build skill strategies into the classroom teaching: Whenever possible, highlight skills strategies and allow time for regular practice.

      Spend time on reading and following instructions:  Reading and following instructions is a real-life task. Spend time on in is valuable for the students.

      Familiarize your students with a range of formats: constantly introduce new formats and allow plenty of time to practice them.

      Promote and reward good planning: Foster a positive attitude toward by rewarding students who make an effort.

      Discuss and practice timing issues: Promote developing time management skills in students’ provident timed tasks.

      Encourage a variety of review activities: If is possible provide time, space and materials to help the students to review efficiently.

      Remind students of the importance of rest, recreation and diet in exams periods.

      Provide students with helpful feedback: It helps them to improve.

      Active encourage learner autonomy through self-assessment: Regularly use self-assessment techniques to foster autonomy.

Assessing English Language Learners
http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/choosing-and-devising-test-tasks

http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/special-needs-8409290

Students with special needs motivational presentation for teachers and students.

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.

Principle one

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Principle one

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Yohana materials develpment for elt

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Yohana materials develpment for elt

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Free Printable Certificates

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Free Printable Certificates

Evolution of Instructional Materials

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Evolution of instructional materials

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Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials: Research Update

By Professor M.E.d Yohana Aguirre Alvarez

As it has been said before, second language teachers should select carefully the instructional materials used in the process. Furthermore, it has been said that they should be created by the teacher because in this way  they are properly contextualized and fit the needs of the students.

What istructional materials should have?  there are some principles that a teacher must follow when designing or selecting materials. First, materials should have certain elements that motivate the student to learn, those elements should be positive expectation that include a good climate and activities that help the students' improvement properly contextualized; feedback, that is very important because in this way the students notice their progress and are aware of their learning process and then, the appearence of the materials. They have to look attractive but complete; that is, they have to be meaningful for the learner.  Second, the instructional materials should throughly teach a few important ideas, concepts or themes. These ideas help the learner to have the picture of what the topic is about.  Third, The materials must contain clear statements of information and outcomes.  For this principle, explicit instruction is relevant since it clarifies direction and explanations and ambieguity is excluded.  Fourth, instructional materials must include guidance and support to help students safely and successfully become more independent learners and thinkers. This is that the students obtain the guidence and support in the needed levels to improve their language skills. Finally, Instructional materials should include instructional and assessement strategies that make the students successful learners. Those strategies must be aligned correctly and completely enough.

Materials To Develop The Speaking Skill

By Professor M.E.d Yohana Aguirre Alvarez

Certainly materials for second language instruction must reflect creativity and authenticity.  For Rebeca Hughes, "Speaking is a unique form of communication which is the basis of all human relationships and the primary channel for the projection of individual identity."  So that,  materials for speaking skills development must integrate all the elements that guaranty authentic usage of the language which is communication.   Before designing materials for speaking skills, the instructor have to take in to account certain elements and find a balance to prepare those materials such as the ccomplexity of oral production, spontaneity when speaking, feelings, personality traits, cultural elements and international varieties of the spoken language.

Furthermore, the purpose of these materials should reflect firstly,  the way the spoken language differs from the written. Trying to use perfect language would not help the learner. Secondly, language is about negotiate meaning and interchange, so that a language is a process of collaboration. thirdly, the practical and cultural interference must be shown when students are practicing the language. 

YOHANA`S LANGUAGE RESOURCE CENTER: Principles of Effective Materials Development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mgwWhWa0Q8

Principles of Effective Materials Development

By Professor M.E.d Yohana Aguirre Alvarez
yoguitika@gmaill.com

According to Brian Tomlinson, author of Principles of Effective Materials Development, "language learning materials should ideally be driven by learning and teaching principles rather tan the developed ad hoc or in imitation of best selling coursebooks". It means that the creation of language materials for teaching-learning should be the result of the practice of certain principles for teaching and the teaching practice itself instead of copy them or modify them from books or other academic sources. 

In my opinion, we teachers should take this idea in to account when designing language materials for classes. First, because many of materials available in books and Internet are not contextualized.  The students would find materials nice, but they can loose their interest because those materials do not fit with their needs or reality. It`s important to create materials that give the students the opportunity to practice the language and communicate with the certain that the language is going to be useful in order to express their opinions or give information about what they know.  Second, the majority of these materials are created or prepared to "teach" a second language. It means that they are artificial.  The usage of authentic material is crucial for the learning of a second language, since  the students need to be exposed to authentic language and settings.

For a teacher is important to know the principles of effective language teaching in order to create effective and relevant materials for the students. In this way, the learning is meaningful and the motivation will be increased.