· Tests can be a positive experience, they can build a person´s confidence and become learning experiences. They can bring out the best in students.
WHAT IS A TEST?
· A test is a method of measuring a person´s ability, knowledge or performance in a given domain.
Method: it is an instrument that requires performance on the test-taker.
It Measures general abilities as well as specific knowledge of the test-taker.
It measures a given domain.
ASSESSMENT AND TEACHING
· Teachers TEACH a certain aspect of a given domain of English Language (for instance). During this time the teacher gives the students opportunity of practicing, listen, take risks, set goals and process feedback. Within this process the teacher is constantly, formally and informally ASSESSING his and her students, sometimes even in an unconscious way. Whenever a student responds to a question or offers a comment or uses a new word, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the pupil´s performance. This can be done during clases or outside of the classroom, whenever the teacher and student interact.
· And finally, in order for teachers to measure his or her student´s development on language learning, they give TESTS to the students, which are a subset of assessment.
Informal Assessments: incidental, unplanned comment and responses along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student (e.g. marginal comments on papers).
Formal Assessments : systematic, planned sampling techniques constructed to give teacher and student an apraisal of student achievement (e.g. tests).
Formative Assessment: evaluating students in the process of forming their competences and skills with the goal of helping them continue that growth process.
Summative Assessment: occurs at the end of a course or unit of a course or unit of instruction. It aims to measure, or summarize, what a student has grasped.
Norm-Referenced Tests: place the test-taker along a mathematical continuum in rank order. They have predetermined responses. Their primary concern are money and eficiency.
Criterion-Referenced Tests: are designed to give test-takers feedback, usually in the form of grades. They intend to deliver the test-taker useful, appropiate feedback. Those tests which involve the students in only one class, connected to a curriculum, are typical of criterion-referenced testing.
miércoles, 4 de julio de 2007
Assessing speaking
What is speaking?
It is one of the productive skills. Listening and speaking are almost closely interrelated. It is difficult to isolate oral production tasks that do not directly involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Most of speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic strings.
The speaker makes choices:
Lexicon
Structure
Discourse
Scoring speaking: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar comprehensibility etc.
Types of speaking:
1.-Imitative: the ability to simply parrot back (imitative) phonetic level of oral production, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical properties of languages. Interested only in pronunciation
2. - Intensive: the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical phrasal, lexical or phonological relationship intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture.
3. - Responsive: interaction and test comprehension of short conversations. Simple request and comments.
4. - Interactive: it has the purpose of exchanging specific information or interpersonal exchanges.
5. - Extensive: (monologue) includes oral presentations and story telling. Language style is frequently more deliberative and formal for extensive tasks.
Micro and Macro Skills
The micro skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.
The macro skills imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.
THERE ARE THREE IMPORTANTS ISSUES FOR DESIGNING TASKS:
1. - Involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possibly reading
2.- Your elicitation should prompt achieves its aims as closely as possible
3.- specify scoring procedures for a response
It is one of the productive skills. Listening and speaking are almost closely interrelated. It is difficult to isolate oral production tasks that do not directly involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Most of speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic strings.
The speaker makes choices:
Lexicon
Structure
Discourse
Scoring speaking: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar comprehensibility etc.
Types of speaking:
1.-Imitative: the ability to simply parrot back (imitative) phonetic level of oral production, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical properties of languages. Interested only in pronunciation
2. - Intensive: the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical phrasal, lexical or phonological relationship intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture.
3. - Responsive: interaction and test comprehension of short conversations. Simple request and comments.
4. - Interactive: it has the purpose of exchanging specific information or interpersonal exchanges.
5. - Extensive: (monologue) includes oral presentations and story telling. Language style is frequently more deliberative and formal for extensive tasks.
Micro and Macro Skills
The micro skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.
The macro skills imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.
THERE ARE THREE IMPORTANTS ISSUES FOR DESIGNING TASKS:
1. - Involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possibly reading
2.- Your elicitation should prompt achieves its aims as closely as possible
3.- specify scoring procedures for a response
Discovery school
Discovery school is the equivalent as a platform like nicenet. It is also an academic platform.We work in this useful website with the capter assessing reading.
The purpopse of this work was understand and apply the main assessment aspects to reading activities. We searched in the internet and selected real texts according to the level of the students (vocabulary and grammatical structures.) We also designed tasks to assess reading using free online resources.
The objective of this class was: the student would understand ifferent types of readibg by choosing the appropiate texts.(academic reading.)
Listening skills
Some of the most important listening skills are:
Listening for gist
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and answer general questions about it to show that they understand the main idea.Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world and answer questions such as:1. Is the speaker optimistic or pessimistic?2. Does the speaker think there are a lot of problems in the world?
Listening for detail
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and get the most important information from it. To focus the students’ attention, they can be given questions about the tape before they listen to it.
Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world. Before listening, they read questions such as:
1. What does the speaker think are the five main problems of the world?
2. Which country does he give as an example of each problem?
3. What solution does he suggest for each problem?
Students can then try to answer one or more of the questions before listening (a pre-listening activity), or listen to the tape and then answer the questions.
Listening for specific information
An important listening skill. Students listen for a short list of specific information on a tape which contains other information as well.Example: Students listen to a tape of a person asking for information about a flight times. They answer questions such as:
1. What are the numbers of the flights to France?
2. What times are the flights to France?
3. How long does it take to fly to France?
Listening for specific information is similar to Listening for detail. The difference is that in Listening for specific information, students are required to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. In Listening for detail, the students are required to extract all the information.
Inferential listening
In an inferential listening exercise, the answers to the question you ask the students are not in the language of the tape. Students must infer the answers from a range of clues.
Example:Students listen to a tape of an argument in an office. They identify the people who are angry and the people who are trying to stop the argument.
Listening for gist
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and answer general questions about it to show that they understand the main idea.Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world and answer questions such as:1. Is the speaker optimistic or pessimistic?2. Does the speaker think there are a lot of problems in the world?
Listening for detail
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and get the most important information from it. To focus the students’ attention, they can be given questions about the tape before they listen to it.
Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world. Before listening, they read questions such as:
1. What does the speaker think are the five main problems of the world?
2. Which country does he give as an example of each problem?
3. What solution does he suggest for each problem?
Students can then try to answer one or more of the questions before listening (a pre-listening activity), or listen to the tape and then answer the questions.
Listening for specific information
An important listening skill. Students listen for a short list of specific information on a tape which contains other information as well.Example: Students listen to a tape of a person asking for information about a flight times. They answer questions such as:
1. What are the numbers of the flights to France?
2. What times are the flights to France?
3. How long does it take to fly to France?
Listening for specific information is similar to Listening for detail. The difference is that in Listening for specific information, students are required to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. In Listening for detail, the students are required to extract all the information.
Inferential listening
In an inferential listening exercise, the answers to the question you ask the students are not in the language of the tape. Students must infer the answers from a range of clues.
Example:Students listen to a tape of an argument in an office. They identify the people who are angry and the people who are trying to stop the argument.
speaking skills
Some speaking skills which are useful for our students are:
use of position holders
appropriate use of register
making a speech.The field of speaking skills is not so clearly defined as the other three skills.
use of position holders
appropriate use of register
making a speech.The field of speaking skills is not so clearly defined as the other three skills.
Writing skills
Some of the most important writing skills are:
taking notes
writing a passage from notes
writing formal letters
writing informal letters
writing e-mails
writing a resume.
taking notes
writing a passage from notes
writing formal letters
writing informal letters
writing e-mails
writing a resume.
Reading skills
Reading skills.
Skimming An important reading skill - learners read for the general content of a text. An example of skimming in real life is when we look through an article to get a general idea of what it’s about, before reading in detail.
Example in class:
1. Students are given a newspaper article to read.
2. They have to answer these questions:
Is it a story about a) a crime, b) a rescue, c) an accident?
Is it a story about a) a lot of people, b) a lot of animals, c) one person?
Always give a time limit for skimming exercises, to ensure that the students don’t try to read the passage word by word.
Scanning One of the most important reading skills - learners search a text quickly for specific information.
An example of scanning in real life is looking quickly through the headlines of newspaper for articles of interest.
Example:
A typical scanning exercise in class:
1. Students are given a story about a celebrity.
2. First they read ten questions such as:
What is the name of the celebrity?
Where was he?
Who did he talk to?
3. Then they look quickly at the text to find the answers.
Identifying key words An important reading skill. Students underline the key words in a text, or complete a table with key words from the text.
Example:
Students read a description of a house and complete a table with key words. The completed table might look like this:
Location: near the town, on a hill
Size: big
Rooms: kitchen, sitting room, dining room, study, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
Special features: large garden, swimming pool
General impression: very comfortable, expensive.
Reading for gist An important reading skill. It involves reading a passage to get a general idea of what it’s about, but not worrying about understanding the complete content or every specific idea.
Skimming An important reading skill - learners read for the general content of a text. An example of skimming in real life is when we look through an article to get a general idea of what it’s about, before reading in detail.
Example in class:
1. Students are given a newspaper article to read.
2. They have to answer these questions:
Is it a story about a) a crime, b) a rescue, c) an accident?
Is it a story about a) a lot of people, b) a lot of animals, c) one person?
Always give a time limit for skimming exercises, to ensure that the students don’t try to read the passage word by word.
Scanning One of the most important reading skills - learners search a text quickly for specific information.
An example of scanning in real life is looking quickly through the headlines of newspaper for articles of interest.
Example:
A typical scanning exercise in class:
1. Students are given a story about a celebrity.
2. First they read ten questions such as:
What is the name of the celebrity?
Where was he?
Who did he talk to?
3. Then they look quickly at the text to find the answers.
Identifying key words An important reading skill. Students underline the key words in a text, or complete a table with key words from the text.
Example:
Students read a description of a house and complete a table with key words. The completed table might look like this:
Location: near the town, on a hill
Size: big
Rooms: kitchen, sitting room, dining room, study, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
Special features: large garden, swimming pool
General impression: very comfortable, expensive.
Reading for gist An important reading skill. It involves reading a passage to get a general idea of what it’s about, but not worrying about understanding the complete content or every specific idea.
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