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3.4 USING SUBJECTIVELY-SCORED ASSESSMENTS
Teaching is not simple training. Every teacher should know how to plan the future process. We should focus on people who love learning so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned and how to assess them. The importance of classroom assessment in Uzbekistan has been increasingly recognized since the change of old curriculum paradigm into the newest concept of curriculum that places students as the center of learning.
More specifically, it becomes a teachers and government’s concern when the new curriculum is implemented. The experience of engaging with many colleagues in this way was rewarding in itself. In all cases, I found academics who were motivated to provide their students with the best learning experiences and outcomes they could. Their deliberations around the creation of their concept maps were conducted seriously, sometimes with passion, occasionally with contentions which had to be explored further. Many common themes emerged, but with sometimes different priorities, and often influenced by different local priorities, constraints, philosophies, and/or stakeholders.
These differences can be discerned across the tables which populate the resource, but I have deliberately avoided attributing any differences to a specific context. In some cases, the emerging perspectives may have been representative of a culture or nationality, but I have no reason to believe that to be the case. The value of the tables is not to present findings on differences – but to stimulate further dialogue and reciprocal learning, building from the perspectives of groups of faculty working in diverse contexts.
Linguistic interference can lead to correct language production when the mother tongue and the target language share many linguistic features. However, the transfer can result in errors when both languages differ. Learners’ culture can be a barrier to second or foreign language learning. Cultural differences may cause confusion and cultural misunderstandings. Learners may have problems communicating with target native speakers because of cultural differences.
Learning a language means learning to speak and comprehend it. But learners can’t reach a high level of proficiency unless they are able to use the target language appropriately in the context of the target culture. To reach a pragmatic and socio linguistic competence, learners should be able to make correct assumptions about what interlocutors are saying.
However, when both cultures differ in so many aspects learning is at risk. Teachers must take into considerations the strategies learners use to learn a second language. Learners tend to use their linguistic knowledge of the mother tongue (and may be knowledge of other languages they have learned.) Learners try to transfer their cultural knowledge to make assumption when communicating in the target language. Teachers must spot and highlight those shared features that may contribute to the target language learning. Teachers must be cautious in error correction because errors may be the result of negative language transfer or incorrect assumptions held about the target culture.
If I am teaching a class where I have reason to suspect that the students already have some knowledge of the topic, I may conduct a quick quiz so that I can work out a baseline of where the class is up to so that I do not waste everyone’s time covering stuff they know already, but after that the sequence is: 1. Explain a topic. 2. Do a formative test of some type 3. Use the results of that to help the students identify any weaknesses or misconceptions they may have, and address them. 4. Do a summative assessment. 5. Move on to the next topic.
If you omit the explaining phases, all you would do would be to present the students with a sequence of unanswerable questions, or at least questions for which they would have no idea about the depth or complexity of the required answer, in order to fulfill that section of the syllabus.
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