Second edition

continuous assessment or a portfolio, to assess students over time, more like a
film. A portfolio can contain all of the student's work for a period of time, or just a
selection of the work. Sometimes it will also include some kind of evaluation written
by the student of his/her own work. By looking at a student's portfolio we can assess
their progress over a longer period of time. Portfolios can be used both for assessment
by the teacher and for self-assessment. There are a number of advantages to portfolio
assessment:
© Portfolios are easy to integrate into teaching and learning, i.e. they contain work
that learners do as part of their normal classroom programme.
© Portfolios are inclusive, i.e, they include the whole range of learners' work, not just
a few test tasks,


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Module 2

© Portfolios are informative, i.e, they provide a wide range of useful information for teachers, learners and parents, as they focus on productive and receptive skills, and they show what learners can do with the language in the classroom and outside the classroom, not just in test situations.

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   Portfolios are developmental, i.e. assessment is continuous rather than being a single event, so they show how learning is progressing, not just what the learner can do on one particular day.
   

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   Portfolios can also be reflective, when the owner of the portfolio (i.e. the student) writes some comments about the work, which are included as part of the portfolio.
   

Portfolios can also have disadvantages: for example, the teacher may have a large amount of marking at any one time and much of the marking may be quite subjective. Continuous assessment, in which each piece of work that the student gives in throughout the term contributes to a final mark, can overcome the problem of having lots of marking to do at one time.
■ Key concepts and the language teaching classroom
Read these tips and tick the ones which are most important for you.

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   When we use subjective tasks, such as oral interviews, letters and essays, to get information about learners' general ability to use spoken and written language, we can help make the marking of these tests more reliable by using assessment criteria (see Unit 18).
   

© When we prepare a class test, it is Important to test the main things we have taught, and to include a number of different tasks, so that we get a good picture of our learners' strengths and weaknesses.
ф For young learners, we need to choose assessment tasks very carefully, making sure that the tasks are familiar and not too difficult, loo abstract or too long.

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  The amount and type of informal assessment we do depend on a number of things:
  

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  the size of the class
  
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  the age of the learners (informal assessment is especially useful for young learners for whom formal test tasks are often too abstract)
  
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  the language knowledge, behaviours or skills we want to assess
  
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  the frequency of formal tests or examinations.
  

m It is important in informal assessment for learners to know that we are assessing them, and to know how and when we are doing it. m To carry out informal assessment of productive skills in larger classes, we probably need to assess small numbers of learners in different lessons. We can observe the class or particular students and record our opinions on a record sheet or fill in a checklist. We need to plan informal assessment and think about how we can organise assessment activities as part of our teaching.
© We can carry out informal assessment of receptive skills by checking learners' answers to reading or listening tasks, and taking notes on their performance.

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  We can assess learners' grammatical and lexical knowledge informally by using language games or quizzes, or by monitoring practice activities and making a note of frequent errors. We can then give feedback to individuals or to the whole class, or return to the problems later in a revision lesson.
  

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Unit 22 Choosing assessment activities