6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
and effectiveness, the more the teacher is likely to learn about the 
students’ level of understanding and ability to use the forms in question.
Recycling involves fi nding opportunities to use what has been learned 
in new contexts. This could be further tasks that involve using the kinds of 
grammatical or discourse patterns that have been the focus. The objective 
of these kinds of teaching strategies is to encourage learners to attend to 
the formal characteristics of the language, thinking about how to express 
different concepts and to achieve different communicative purposes.
Assisting learners to complete tasks by intervening with structured 
support, rather than providing the correct answer, is referred to as scaffolding 
(see 
Chapter 4
). This involves modifying the diffi culty of a task so that the 
learner is able to complete it. For example, if, in an interview, a learner is 
unable to respond to a question (
What is your home town like?
), the teacher 
might try rephrasing or reducing the scope of the question (
Where is your 
home town?
). If the learner is still unable to answer, the teacher might 
provide a series of binary choices (
Is your home town large or small? Is your 
home town near the sea?
). The extent of support could range from suggesting 
one or two words to modelling an answer. Once the learner has managed to 
complete the task with support, the assistance can be progressively 
withdrawn until the learner is able to carry out the task without it.
On one level, this can be seen as a helpful teaching technique as the 
process should aid the learner in improving his or her ability to carry 
out this kind of task. However, it can also be seen as a very powerful 
assessment technique because it reveals to the assessor not only 
whether or not the learner is currently able to carry out the task, but 
also how close they are to being able to carry it out independently.