Assessing Speaking

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Lcda. Cleopatra Noel Drummond

The six chapter is related to assessing speaking, but we need to define what is speaking? and it is define as the way to utter words or articulate sounds, or to express thoughts by words, express opinions: to say; to talk. This productive skill is more complicated than it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words.

Canale and Swain (1980) argue that there are four competenes underlying speaking ability:

• Grammatical competence: includes knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics.
• Discourse competence; concerned with relationships beyond the sentence level, of cohesion and conference, holding communication together in a meaningful way.
• Sociolinguistic competence; applying knoweledge of what is expected socially and culturally by users of the target language.
• Strategic competence: the way learners manipulate language in order to meet communicative goals.

To focus on assessment speaking we need to understand the differences between the two productive language skills (writing and speaking). Writing and speaking differ significantly according to Jones those differences "are fundamental to our understanding of the construct of speaking and any assessment of this skil must take these features into consideration." In contrast to writing, speaking is more ephemeral unless        measures are taken to record student performance.

Before teacher design speaking assessments she/he needs to know if to focus more on fluency or accuracy. Fluency is important for students, but if there are many errors, that might impede comprehension. If you expouse an equal emphasis on fluency and accuracy, we recommend the following marking categories: accuracy (grammar), vocabulary, linguistic ability (pronunciation, intonation, and stress.) fluency (ability to express ideas) and content or ideas.

A final concern before designing the assessment is deciding what type of speaking samples to collect from students. Brown and Yule (1983) recommend collecting speaking data with the following characteristics:

• speech that has a purpose
• extended chunks of speech
• speech that is structured or organized
• tasks where the amount of speech is controlled
• tasks where there is a specific number of points of required information 

The formal speaking assessment techniques include the speaking test or oral interview which is perhaps the most common format for assessing speaking on well-known language examination. Canale believed that students perform best when they are led through these stages: warn up, level check, probe, wind down.

There is a variantion on the way students can be tested such as: individually, in pairs, or in groups of three, it is important to provide time for each individual to speak as well as opportunities for interaction. However, examiners should take care not to let one student monopolize the conversation. 

Here are some common tasks that can be used for the level-check stage:

• Picture clue
• Prepared Monologue.
• Role play.
• Information Gap Activity

The classroom speaking assessment techniques include the following: oral presentations, debate on a controversial topic, reading aloud, retelling stories, verbal essays, and extemporaneos speaking.

There are some important things to remember about speaking assessment:

1. Allow time for a warm-up.
2. Keep skill contamination in mind.
3. Larger samples of language are more reliable.
4. Choose a range of appropriate techniques.
5. Ensure valid and reliable scoring by choosing an appropriate scale.

Finally to conclude with this item of assessing speaking I will say that it is important to permit the students to use the language in the classroom and as teacher of a second language this topic enhance my knowledge in such a way that for my profesion and vocacion as a teacher it will help the students to develop and use this skill which is speaking.

GLOSSARY

1. Underlie: 

2. Germane:.

3. Ephemeral

4. Feasible:

5. Odds

Assessing Listening.

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 Lcda. Cleopatra Noel Drummond

The fifth chapter of the book Assessing English Language Learners is base on how do we assess listening, but what is listening? To give attention with the ear; attend closely for the purpose of hearing."Active listening is a way of listening that focuses entirely on what the other person is saying and confirms understanding of both the content of the message and the emotions and feelings underlying the message to ensure that understanding is accurate."

Models of Listening

Acording to Nunan (2002) we must first understand the nature of listening. They are two models that have been identified in the literature.

1- Bottom-up processing listening is believed to be a linear, data-driven process. Comprehension occurs when the listener successfully decodes the spoken test. Comprehension occurs un the bottom up processing view when students take in a word, decode it, and link it with other words to form a sentence.

2- Top-down listening, the listener is directly involved with the constructing meaning from input. in this process the student uses background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of what is heard.

Approaches to Listening Assessment

According to Buck 2001) they are three major approaches to the assessment of listening abilities these are:

1- The discrete-point approach it broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately.

2- The integrative approach attempt the assess a learner's capacity to use many bits at the same time, they believed that the whole language is greater that the sum of its parts.

3- The communicative approach arose as the integrative approach as a result of the communicative language teaching movement. The listener must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context.

Before attempting to design a listening test, teachers should consult the course objectives and the listening test specifications that will provide information about objectives, formats, and themes. The tasks should reflect those that occur in real-life situations, and the language used should be natural.

Background knowledge.

the background or prior knowledge needs to be taken into account because research suggests the background knowledge affects comprehension and test performance. The background knwoledge is related to: test content, the texts, the vocabulary, the test structure, the formats, the item writing, timing, and skill contamination. 

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension

1- Phonemic discrimination.

2- Paraphrase recognition (students listen to a statement and select the option closest in meaning to the statement.)

3- Objective formats (like MCQs and T/F can be used to assess listening content.)

4- Short answer questions.

5. Cloze.

6- Dictation.

Information Transfer Tasks

Information transfer tasks require students to transfer information they have heard to a chart or visual. Common examples of information transfer tasks used in the assessment of listening are filling in a form or a timetable, labeling a graph, finding something on a map, and following instructions.

Note-taking

Note-taking is an authentic task in academic programs. Students are actively involved as they write key information they understand from the input test. This can be done in two ways: students listen abd simultaneously fill out the questions paper or take notes.

Things to remember about assessing listening.

1- Assess listening comprehension even though is to difficult to assess.

2- Give credit for what students know.

3- Don't forget the importance of background knowledge.

4- Don't just test what is easy to test.

5- Give students a reason for listening.

Finally I will say that this skill is a bit difficult to assess notwithstanding as teachers we can find the adequate method to do so in behalf of the students. 

GLOSSARY

1. Rationale: The reasoning or principle that underlies or explains something, or a statement setting out this reasoning or principle.

2. Scope: To look at or examine something.


3.Purports: To pretend to be or to do something.


4. Contrived: Something that is contrived seems false and not natural.


5. Overlap: To position things in such a way that the edge of one thing is on top of and extending past the edge of another, or be positioned in this way.

Assessing Writing

By: Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

Assessing writing skills is important becasue good writing ability is highly sought by higher education institutions and employers. Some of the things to do to ensure valid and reliable writing assessment are:

• Avoids an approach of assessing writing ability by giving students plenty of opportunities to practice a variety of writing skills.
• Gives multiple-measures writing assessement by using tasks that focus on product and process.
• Gives frequent writing assessments because she knows that assessment is more reliable when there are more samples to assess.
• Avoids using a red pen to mark students' papers.

Approaches to writing assessment

Indirect measures of writing assessment assess correct usage in sentence-level constructions and assess spelling and punctuation via objective formats like multiple choice and cloze test.

Direct measures of writing assessment assess a student's ability to communicate through the written mode based on the actual production of written texts.

They are some considerations in designing writing assessment tasks. The first element of a good writing assessment is the rubric, the instructions for carrying out the writing task. A rubric can also mean the set of criteria on which a piece of work, such as a project, is evaluated, and it is used in this sense in elementaru education. The second essential part of any test of writing is the writing prompt as the stimulus the students must respond to. We can identify three main prompt formats: base, framed, and text-based. The first two are the most common in second/foreign language writing assessment. Base prompts state the entire task un direct and simple terms, whereas framed prompts present the writer with a situation that acts as a frame for the interpretation of the task. Text-based prompts present writers with a text to which they must respond or utilize in their writing. The third essential element of good writing assessment es the expected response, a description of what the teacher intends students to do with the writing task. Before communicating information in the expected response to students, the teacher must have a clear picture of the type of response the assessment task should generate.

Issues in Writing Assessment

They are some issues in writing assessment that I will share with you and it is important to know such as:

1. Time allocation.
2. Process versus product.
3. Use of technology.
4. Topic restriction.

The techniques for assessing writing are two free writng and guided writing. The free writing requires students to read a prompt that poses a situation and write a planned reponse based on a combination of background knowledge and knowledge learned from the course. The guided writing in contrast, requires students to manipulate content that is provided in the prompt, usually in the form of a chart or diagram.

Authentic Writing Assement include the following elements:

1. Student-teacher conferences.
2. Self-assessment (dialogue journals and dialogue journals)
3. Peer assessment (another assessment technique, involves the students in the evaluation of writing). 
4. Portfolio-based assessment (examines multiple pieces of writing produced over time under different constraints rather than a single essay written in a specified time period.).  

The writing assessment scales includes the holistic and analytic. The holistic marking scales is based on the marker's total impression of the essay as a whole. Holistic marking is variously as impressionistic, global, or integrative. marking. The analytical marking scales raters provide separate assessments for each of a number of aspects of performance.

They are some things to remember about the writing assessment such as:

- Give students multiple writing assessment opportunities.

- Develop prompts that are appropriate for the students.

- Evaluate all answers to one question before going on the next.

- Mark only what the student has written.

- Get students involved.

- Provide students with diagnostic feedback.

GLOSARRY

1. Snapshot:  A record or view of a particular point in a sequence of events or a continuing process.

2. Benchmark: To provide a standard against which something can be measured or assessed.

3. Cloze: A test of comprehension and grammar in which a language student supplies appropriate missing words omitted from a text.

4. Prompt: to make somebody decide to do something.

5. Approach: A way of doing something.

Assessing Reading

Posted by:

Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

The third chapter of the book a practical guide to Assessing English Language Learners is related to how to assess reading but what is reading?  Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning (reading comprehension). It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas. Like all language, it is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, attitude, and language community which is culturally and socially situated. The reading process requires continuous practices, development, and refinement. 

The approaches to reading for most English language teachers reading includes both bottom up skills - recognizing and making sense of letters, words, and sentences - and top down processing that deals with whole texts. teachers would also agree taht text applies to booth linear passages of prose as well as a wide variety of non linear sources of information such as maps and pie charts.

Reading Subskills

The reading subskills can be divided in two stages:

Major reading skills that includes:

• Reading quickly to skim for gist, scan for specific details, and establish overalll organization of the passage.
• Reading carefully for main ideas, supporting details, author's argument and purpose, relationship of paragraphs, and fat versus opinion.
• Information transfer from nonlinear texts

Minor or enabling reading skills include:

• Understanding at the sentence level.
• Understanding at inter-sentence level.
• Understanding components of nonlinear texts. 

The specifications help teachers and administrators establish a clear link between the overall objectives for the program and the design of particular assessment instruments. Some typical features of specifications are:

1. content.
2. conditions.
3. grading criteria.

There are many sources for reading texts. Texts can be purpose written, taken directly from authentic material, or adapted. The best way to develop good reading assessments is to constantly watch for appropeiate material. Reading texts include both prose passages and non-linear texts such as: tables, graphs, schedules, maps, advertisements, and diagrams.

Assessing reading is also related to questions and formats which the teachers are in the need to build the appropriate reading comprehension in their classrooms, in which they apply the adequate format and the questions that are need to achieve the goal.

Teachers should take in consideration these tips whenever they are going to apply an assessment in reading such as:

• Make sure your assessment matches your reading program.
• Use authentic or asapted texts whenever possible.
• Exploit the entire text.
• Include grammar and vocabulary in context.
• Assess inferencing and critical thinking.

GLOSSARY

1. Schemata: An outline, diagram, plan, or preleminary draft.

2. Interwoven: To weave together; interlace.

3. Gist: The essencial point or meaning of something.

4. Inferences: A conclusion draw from evidence or reasoning.

5. Washback:Is the influence that a test has on the way students are taught.

6. Coverage: The attention gives an event or topic by newspapers, radio, and televsion in their reporting.

7. Allocated. To give something to or set something aside for a person or purpose.

8. Collocations: The association between two words that are typically or frequently used together.

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Techniques for testing.

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Licda: Cleopatra Noel Drummond

The second chapter has to do with the techniques uses to prepare a test and all that it takes. The balances between the objective and subjective formats, the strives for authentic use of target language through texts and communicative tasks, and others.

Classifying test items and tasks

The classification of a test can be as selection or supply. The selection is where students select the correct answer from a number of presented options such as: true/false, matching and multiple choice. Supply items students must supply or construct the correct answer examples of these are short answer or completion, cloze, gap fill and essay questions.

Subjective or objective questions

Objective test items are those that can be score base only on following an answer key, it requires neither expert judgment nor specialist knowledge. The objective items are usually short answer – closed response items. Objective test items are very popular with language teachers and test developers because these items are easy and quick to mark. They are flexible in that objective test items can be used to test both global and detailed understanding test. 

Subjective test requires that the maker have knowledge of the content area being tested and it depends on impression, human judgment, and opinion at the time of scoring. This kind of items usually requires the students to produce longer, more open-ended responses. The emphasis is that students make come up with an answer rather than select it from a list of alternatives.

Multiple choice questions

This type of item is the most common one used. Teachers all over the world are familiar with the format from their own learning experience. The popularity of the multiple choice questions is based on several advantages associated with this format:

Ø  If they are written well they are very reliable because there is only one answer possible.

Ø  They can be useful at various educational levels.

Ø  The assessment is not affected by test takers writing abilities because they are only required to circle the correct response.

Some of the disadvantages of using these MCQs are:

v  It does not permit the testing of productive language skills or language as communication.

v  It encourages guessing which can have an effect on exams results.

v  It is challenging and time consuming to write plausible distracters are produces good items.

     Whenever teachers are going to write MCQs they are some tips to take in considerations such as:

       The questions should be clear from the stem.

      Take background knowledge into account.

      Provide as much context as possible.

      Standardize the number of response options.

      All response options should be similar in length and level of difficulty.

True/false format

True/false questions are typically written as statements, and the students’ task is to decide whether they are true or false. They are attractive to many test developers because when they use this questions type, they can test large amounts of content, it require less time for students to respond to them, the scoring is quick and reliable and can be accomplished efficiently and accurately.

These are some tips for writing good true/false questions:

      Question should be written at a lower level of language difficulty.

      Consider the effects of background knowledge.

      Questions should appear in the same order as the answer appears in thetest.

      Avoid absoluteness clues

      Focus each item on a single idea from the text.

       Matching format

Matching is an extended form of MCQ that draws on the student’s ability to make connections among ideas, vocabulary, and structure. The format presents the students with two columns of information and the students must find the matches between the columns.

Some tips for writing matching items are:

      Give more options than premise.

      Number the premise and letter the options.

      Make options shorter than premises.

      Options and premises should be related to one central theme.

Cloze/gap-fill items

The cloze testing item is as a test of reading comprehension. The student’s task is to complete the gaps with appropriate fillers

In gap-fill items a word or phrase is replaced by a blank in a sentence. The student’s task is to fill in the missing word or phrase.

They are two types of gap fills:

v      Function gaps such as prepositions, articles, conjunctions.

v     Semantic gaps such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.

Some of the tips for writing cloze/gap-fill items are:

      Ensure that answers are concise.

      Provide enough contexts.

      Blanks should be of equal length.

      Develop and allow for a list of acceptable responses.

       Short answer/completion items

They are items that ask students to answer in a few words, phrases, or sentences. They have some advantages such as: they encourages students to learn and know the answer rather than just recognize it, students must produce the answer, there is less guessing, they are especially good for checking gist, and these questions types can test higher-order thinking skills.

Two things to know when you are writing these items:

      There should be only one short, concise answer.

      Allow for partial credit.

Essay questions

Essay questions offer students the greatest opportunity to construct their own responses. Essay questions are the most useful format for assessing higher-order cognitive processes such as analyzing, evaluating, summarizing, and synthesizing.

These questions not only assess content knowledge, they place a premium on writing ability.

Some of the tips to build these essay questions are:

     1. Make all questions similar I level of difficulty,

     2.   Write questions that force students to use higher-order thinking skills.

     3. Allow students enough space to write their answer.

    4.  Assess content selectively.

      Share the scoring rubric with students prior to the exam.

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The Process of Developing Assessment.

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Licda: Cleopatra Noel Drummond

The first chapter as to do with the process of developing assessment in the same you will find a summary of the most important points on this subject. What is assessment? It is said that assessment is an integral part of the entire curriculum cycle, not something tacked on as an afterthought to teaching. 

For such reason it includes the phases of planning, development, administration, analysis, feedback, and reflection. 

Planning

The planning for assessment must consider why are we assessing and choose a type of assessment that fits the students needs. What is the purpose of the assessment, and what kind of information do we need to get from it?

Specifications

A specification is a detailed description of exactly what is being assessed and how it is being done. Specifications can be simple or complex, depending on the context for assessment. As a rule, the more formal and higher-stakes the assessment, the more detailed specifications need to be to ensure validity and reliability.

They are steps a simpler specifications might include:

• a general description of the assessment.
• a list of skills to be tested and operations students should be able to do.
• the techniques for assessing those skills.
• the expected level of performance and grading criteria

Constructing the Assessment

At this point after used the specifications we have to be sure that the assessment is constructed the right way, whenever a teacher builds her test she/he needs to prepare an answer key. No matter how good you believe your test is, always try it out on a human being before administering it to your actual target group.  

Preparing Students

Students need accurate information about assessment, and they need to develop good test-taking skills. In many cases teachers need to have outcome statements from the beginning of the course so the students can know what is expected of them. Some teachers post these outcomes in the classroom as a reminder of the goals to be achieved.

Finally I will say the things we need to remember about this topic is that assessment is an integral part of the teaching/learning cycle, transparency and accountability are the hallmarks of good assessment, prepare grading criteria and answer keys along with tests, and plan time for reflection on assessment.