6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
Score reporting and feedback
Reporting to different audiences
As with assessments of reading and listening, outcomes may be reported 
in the form of numeric scores or grades expressing assessors’ judgements 
of assessee performance on a task or series of tasks in relation to other 
learners or in relation to rating scale criteria. Scores from different 
assessment components are often aggregated to give one overall score for 
a test or period of study. Profi le scores may also be provided at the level 
of skills (a score for speaking and a score for writing), elements (scores 
for accuracy, fl uency, organisation, task completion, etc.) or tasks (
C
for 
the essay, 
B
for the letter writing, 
A
for the oral presentation, etc.). 
Descriptive reporting of speaking and writing performance is more 
straightforward than with reading and listening as the assessor is able to 
observe directly how the assessee responds to the assessment tasks. 
Often, rating scales employed by assessors also function to convey the 
meaning of the scores to users of the results. Alderson (1991) raised the 
objection that the kinds of scales employed by trained assessors may be 
too technical or detailed to communicate effectively to non-specialists. 
He recommended the use of adapted 
user-oriented scales
for this purpose.
Feedback
Their retrospective standpoint, delayed feedback, reductive scoring 
and limited sampling limits the diagnostic and formative potential of 
external tests (Stobart, 2008). Classroom assessment, in contrast, can 
take a future-oriented standpoint: ‘How close is the assessee to being 
able to carry out this kind of task?’ ‘What does he or she need to learn 
in order to accomplish it?’ Feedback can be immediate and targeted. 
Grading and scoring can be delayed and shifted to the background, 
with more attention given to more informative, descriptive 
commentaries and teacher–student conferencing. A wider and perhaps 
more representative range of task types can be exploited when the 
constraints of standardisation and time limitations are relaxed.
One way in which language teachers have always provided feedback 
to learners is through error correction. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) 
observed that much classroom interaction follows what they call an 
I-R-F pattern. The I stands for initiation – the teacher asks a question 
or calls on a student to speak: ‘
What colour eyes does Jane have?
’ R is 
for response – a student answers the question: ‘
Mmm. She has blue 
eyes.
’ F is feedback – the teacher accepts or corrects the learner’s 
response, often with an evaluative comment: positive (‘
Good. Yes, she 
has blue eyes.
’) or negative (‘
No, she has brown eyes
.’).
This kind of feedback is certainly immediate, but research has suggested 
that it is not often taken up by the learner and used to modify performance: 

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