How to asses the abilities of the language
- 1. Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción Facultad de Educación Departamento de Lenguas How to assess the abilities of the language Poulette Gutiérrez Nataly Muñoz Professor: Roxanna Correa Concepción, 2014
- 2. SPEAKING (authors: Glenn Fulcher, Sari Luoma) -Speaking is the most difficult skill to assess -Speaking takes time in real time. -There are many factors that affects the performance of students in an oral test (stress, environment) -Students have a short amount of time to show their knowledge, so to make an oral test reliable the teacher should at least record the students ‘interview so in that way the teacher can go back and check any doubt -Students should be always familiar with the format of the test. -The rating scale and the rubric have to be hand by hand. -Training makes perfection LISTENING (author: Gary Buck ) -Listening comprehension is contractive meaning -It is important to give to the students a reason when making a listening test or exercise -Listening does not have an evident product. The teacher designs a task, then the performance, so according to the inferences he/she creates a rubric and finally the teacher evaluates the student -When assessing listening the teacher cannot ask the students to produce something -For beginners is not a good idea to start with an “interactional test” -A good idea to prepare a listening test are sequences exercises (but it is important to give to the students the first paragraph) in order to check ideas READING (author: Caroline Clapham) -First of all, it is important to think in all the abilities that go into reading skills and try to test several of them. -Secondly, it is important to have a list and specifications of the skills needed in reading, skimming and scanning (longer texts), looking for small pieces of information, the general meaning of a paragraph and then try and sample from the list of possible questions that could be included in the reading. -The passages that you choose have to be upon which you can ask good questions. -When testing reading, it is crucial to consider the purpose of the students and use texts that people will read when they are using English. Give the students text that can feel familiar with according to what they are doing at that time. For instance, if they are going to a University in Europe, give them academic text about life in Europe, therefore; del will feel familiar and comfortable with the reading. -Text should look authentic and be as near
- 3. authentic as possible. -It is a good idea to have more than one text, in this way; the texts will be more reliable. -For intensive reading, you can use short texts. -One of the best ways to test reading is short answer questions. It gives the opportunity to ask open ended questions and the students give their answer. -To have heading (and ask the students to produce their own headings) is a good option when testing the overall meaning of a passage. -Matching is another technique; it is important to have more elements in the matching list rather than the required in the heading in order to avoid the elimination. -For advanced readers; gapped summary is a good option. Where the students have a text and then, he has to write a summary of the text filling the gaps. -Turning what the student have read into a chart is another way to test reading WRITING (author: Liz Hamp-Lyons) -One of the most important characteristics of writing assessing is that the test taker writes. -To test writing it is necessary to have a focused topic, a purpose and specifications of the writing. The students need to know the method that the writing is going to be judged. Furthermore; it is expected to have a scale or other element to report the performance to the writers with the correspondence validated instrument. -Writing test are sometimes not very reliable or sometimes reliable, it depends on the writing; to make it more reliable, the test should be longer, which is difficult when measuring writing, since it takes a long time to produce a text. Another way to make a writing test more reliable is to have more than one judge and also by scoring different dimensions of the text, so it is possible to divide the element into the different judges; for instance, the grammar section to one judge; the organization of ideas to another judge and so on. -Moreover, another important element to increase reliability when testing writing is to share information and exchange writings between teachers in order to discuss them and compare what there are doing. -When looking a writing test, teachers should look for as much information as they can. At first sight, teachers should notice how much information can they get out of the test (for instance: score, just numbers, and if it is just a number, see if all the points are explained in a
- 4. References: Clapham. C. M. 1996. The Development of IELTS: A Study of the Effect of Background Knowledge on Reading Comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamp-Lyons, L. 1991. Assessing Second Language Writing in Academic Contexts. Ablex, Norwood NJ. Buck, G. 1992. "Listening Comprehension: Construct Validity and Trait Characteristics." Language Learning 42, 3, 313 - 357. Luoma, S. 2004. Assessing Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fulcher, G. 1998. "The Testing of Speaking in a Second Language." In Clapham, C. M. and Corson, D. (eds.) Language Testing and Assessment. Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 7, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 75 - 85. scale, etc). -A good way to asses writing is to focus on the positive elements of the writing rather than the negative, even if a test is full of mistakes; teachers should look for the good points and emphasized them in order to give a positive feedback to the students and they can get motivated for the next test. Often teachers tend to focus just in the mistakes and errors.