Lecture 1: General problems of Foreign Language teaching

LECTURE 22: Assessment in teaching foreign language
Plan:
1. The Roles of Assessment
2. Making testing more productive
3. Alternatives to testing
4. Types of tests

The Roles of Assessment in Language Teaching is very important during the whole process. Teachers must decide how they intend to measure outcomes and consider what role assessment will play in instruction. Assessment is how we identify our learners’ needs, document of their progress, and determine how we are doing as teachers and planners. That is how do we know we are doing it right. How do we know that the assessment tools we are using measure what we intend them to? If we are serious about getting the best snapshot of the progress of our learners and the effectiveness of our programs, these are questions that we must continually ask. Assessment occurs in many contexts and is done for a variety of reasons. The different aspects of assessment should answer every question, they should help teachers consider how they use assessment in teaching.

Most of our students always remember the horror of receiving results when they were schoolchildren.
Why testing does not work?
There are many arguments against using tests as a form of assessment:

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  Some students become so nervous that they can't perform and don't give a true account of their knowledge or ability
  

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  Other students can do well with last-minute cramming despite not having worked throughout the course
  

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  Once the test has finished, students can just forget all that they had learned
  

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  Students become focused on passing tests rather than learning to improve their language skills.
  

Traditionally, the most common way to measure achievement and proficiency in language learning has been the test. Even though alternative forms of assessment are growing in popularity, most teachers still use this old standby. And while many teachers may be gifted in the classroom, even the best may need some help in constructing reliable test items. Grant Henning (1982) outlines twenty common errors in test construction that language teachers should avoid. Henning’s article can serve as a checklist for any of us who would like to construct fair and reliable language tests. “Coming to Grips with Progress Testing: Some Guidelines for its Design,” Carmen Pérez Basanta (1995) discusses the role of progress testing in the classroom and the importance of matching testing to instruction. Basanta views testing as a tool that can help teachers identify student strengths and weaknesses and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs. Basanta discusses some theoretical requisites to ensure that teachers design or choose tests that are practical, reliable, and valid. In recent years much has been made of alternative forms of assessment. Whether we want to include student portfolios or web-based testing in our curricula, our focus should always be on gathering information that reflects how well our students have learned what we tried to teach them. In his book “Purposeful Language Assessment: Selecting the Right Alternative Test” John Norris (2000) provides an outline of the types of questions we need to ask ourselves in order to best match alternative assessment techniques to the appropriate language education contexts. Assessment is perhaps one of most difficult and important parts of our jobs as teachers. Ideally, it should be seen as a means to help us guide students on their road to learning. No single procedure can meet the needs of all learners and situations, so we need to remember to incorporate a variety of tools to help our students know how they are progressing and to gauge the effectiveness of our own methodology and materials. 
Reasons for testing. Testing is certainly not the only way to assess students, but there are many good reasons for including a test in your language course.

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  A test can give the teacher valuable information about where the students are in their learning and can affect what the teacher will cover next. They will help a teacher to decide if her teaching has been effective and help to highlight what needs to be reviewed. Testing can be as much an assessment of the teaching as the learning
  

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  Tests can give students a sense of accomplishment as well as information about what they know and what they need to review.
  
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    In the 1970s students in an intensive EFL program were taught in an unstructured conversation course. They complained that even though they had a lot of time to practice communicating, they felt as if they hadn't learned anything. Not long afterwards a testing system was introduced and helped to give them a sense of satisfaction that they were accomplishing things. Tests can be extremely motivating and give students a sense of progress. They can highlight areas for students to work on and tell them what has and hasn't been effective in their learning.
    

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  Tests can also have a positive effect in that they encourage students to review material covered on the course.
  
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    At university we are experienced this first hand, we always learned the most before an exam. Tests can encourage students to consolidate and extend our knowledge.
    

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  Tests are also a learning opportunity after they have been taken. The feedback after a test can be invaluable in helping a student to understand something she couldn't do during the test. Thus the test is a review in itself.
  

Making testing more productive. Despite all of these strong arguments for testing, it is very important to bear in mind the negative aspects we looked at first and to try and minimise the effects.

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  Try to make the test a less intimidating experience by explaining to the students the purpose for the test and stress the positive effects it will have. Many may have very negative feelings left over from previous bad experiences.
  

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  Give the students plenty of notice and teach some revision classes beforehand.
  

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  Tell the students that teacher will take into account their work on the course as well as the test result.
  

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  Be sensitive when teachers hand out the results. Teachers have to go through the answers fairly quickly, highlight any specific areas of difficulty and give the students their results on slips of paper.
  

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  Emphasise that an individual should compare their results with their own previous scores not with others in the class.
  

Learning from tests. Finally, it is very important to remember that tests also give teachers valuable information on how to improve the process of evaluation. Questions such as: "Were the instructions clear?", "Are the test results consistent with the work that the students have done on the course. Why/why not?", "Did I manage to create a non-threatening atmosphere?"
All of this will help the teacher to improve the evaluative process for next time. 
Alternatives to testing. Using only tests as a basis for assessment has obvious drawbacks. They are 'one-off' events that do not necessarily give an entirely fair account of a student's proficiency. As we have already mentioned, some people are more suited to them than others. There are other alternatives that can be used instead of or alongside tests.

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  Continuous assessment
  Teachers give grades for a number of assignments over a period of time. A final grade is decided on a combination of assignments.
  

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  Portfolio
  A student collects a number of assignments and projects and presents them in a file. The file is then used as a basis for evaluation.
  

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  Self-assessment. The students evaluate themselves. The criteria must be carefully decided upon beforehand.
  

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  Teacher's assessment. The teacher gives an assessment of the learner for work done throughout the course including classroom contributions.
  
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