ABOUT THE DISCUSSION

I am not very sure about the amount of research that exists concerning how to give effective and meaningful feedback to students.

As all of us know, feedback is a very important part of the assessment process. Our assessment does not finish when we grade or when we say 'well done' or 'you need to improve'; but, it is a process that also covers giving significant feedback to students so that they know what areas need to be improved and how they can do it.

That is why I believe that more research should be done on the way we give feedback to students, to our students in Colombian public schools. As it was highlighted in the reading and as it has been stated by different authors, in each stage of our development we learn in different ways, in the same way we need to be assessed in different ways, and also, I think that we should be given feedback in different ways.

In order to assess our students, we need to take into account different learning styles, likes and dislikes, multiple intelligences, background and conditions at home, etc. In the same way, I think that we need to pay special attention to those same aspects when we are going to give feedback. As we also know there are different difficult situations that our students have to live and go through such as economical, social and psychological ones; and those are issues that affect them. So I really think that we should investigate more how to give the feedback taking into account those conditions.

I believe that we cannot give feedback to one student that suffers violence at home in the same way that we give it to a student that is loved. We cannot give feedback to a student that has emotional problems in the same way as we do with a student that is more emotionally balanced. And of course, we have to think also of the different ages when we are going to give feedback. It is different to give feedback to a 10 year-old kid than to an adult.

I think this is a worth-investigating topic in our public schools in Colombia. In that way, if we know more about this topic, we can improve our quality of education and provide our students with more enriching learning experiences.

Standard-based assessment

For us, as teachers, the implementation of assessment procedures based on standards can be very beneficial. However, it can also bring disadvantages for the students’ learning process.

On the one hand, they are very useful for us since their level of practicality is very high. They can assess lots of people at the same time, they save time when grading, and not many people are needed at the time of administering them.

On the other hand, what I think that is a big disadvantage is the fact that when the assessment procedure is used, the teacher focuses the instruction on the development of the aspects that are included in the standard test and he may forget some other things that he has to cover. I think it is like when at work we have to design the exams. When we design them, we know what topics are going to be evaluated so we redirect our teaching practices or our explanations so that the students perform better. And I also think that that is a disadvantage because we are not giving the same attention to all the aspects learned but we are giving preferences to some of them.

Another disadvantage they have is that they do not take into account the multiple intelligences. They evaluate everybody in the same way, with the same tools and kind of items and do not take into account that each student can have different abilities when answering tests. Many times we as students have the knowledge but do not know how to answer…that is a big and common issue that needs attention in language learning and teaching.

I believ

e that the best way in which standard tests could work out would be if in addition to using them we could also give credit and importance to what happens in the classroom during the instruction and students’ performance.

There are drawbacks too...

It is true that different ways of assessment such as portfolios, conferences, journals, questionnaires and interviews are really good and useful tools for teachers that want to know what students think of the classes, of the instruction and what they feel towards all the methodology of the class. Besides, they are great if we want to know about students’ writing performance and their understanding of topics. However, I think that even if we do want to implement them in our classes, sometimes it becomes really difficult due to different factors; one of the most common problems (and I think it is not just an excuse but it is the sad reality) being the lack of time.

Time is always against teachers at least in our educational system because we have to fulfill the requirements of schools having few hours of class per week and having to work with more than 30 students per class. During classes, if teachers have to meet the content of the curriculum, they do not have enough time to review all the works from students and give them feedback. It is really hard to attend and give feedback to one student while keeping the rest busy without having discipline problems.

In order to avoid these problems, it is necessary to design and create strong strategies that help us while giving our classes a different and innovative.

Some ideas? …

OBSERVATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM  

As a teacher with little experience, I used to observe and make notes during the classes but I did it without a clear purpose in mind. I never set the objectives of my observation and I never stated the specific things I was going to observe; maybe, I did it only when I had to observe in order to assess a skill or to give a grade.

In my case, I think I did it because I did not know about the benefits of observing neither I knew the steps that I had to take into account before observing. Now, having read chapter five, I have a clearer idea of what observing means and involves.

Observations in the classroom are very important and useful. They can be used to gather information about language use, students’ likes and dislikes, the learning strategies that they use, the effectiveness of teaching strategies and so on. Besides, observation can be of great help for teachers if they want to improve their teaching methods; and in the same way, they can be helpful if teachers want to follow the sequence of the curriculum and to know the right time when they can go on with a new topic or they need to reinforce what is being studied.

If observation is going to take place in the classroom and in order for the observation to be successful, teachers have to make some decisions before such as: the reasons for carrying out the observation, what is going to be observed and how to observe. The observation can be done to individual students or to groups, during a single session or during several sessions, during prearranged activities or during routine classroom activities.

In order to do a classroom observation, we can use different types of recording procedures, some of them are: anecdotal records, checklists and rating scales. The first ones being the most informal, taking more time to do and being open while the checklists and the rating scales take less time and effort to complete and are close ended.

All this aspects that observation in the classroom involves are of paramount importance if we want to know more about our students, and if we want to improve the teaching methods in order to create more successful learning experiences for our students.

Are we in a regression time?

Brown (2000) started chapter number 9 stating that “Not many centuries ago, writing was a skill that was the exclusive domain of scribes and scholars in educational or religious institutions”, and after that he also wrote: “today, the ability to write has become an indispensable skill in our global literate community” (p.218), which indicates, according to him, that things have changed and the writing practice is now performed by more people.  However, I think that although things have changed, there is not much difference from then to now and people still do not write and leave that practice only for people who publish books, teachers or linguists.

I do not want to blame somebody for people’s lack of writing, but I could dare to say that that lack of interest in writing comes in most of the cases from teachers that do not encourage and motivate their students to write. I know and I really think that instructing writing is hard work and I have experienced that. Besides, I think that it is harder to teach and guide responsive and extensive writing which require more time, more knowledge and more tools from both, the teacher and the writer. Nevertheless, I believe that we as teachers have to find the way to make students like writing, motivate them and show them the benefits that the writing practice has, benefits such as: learning more about the language, sharing ideas and points of view and improving more their writing skills.

Writing is necessary if we want to succeed in the learning of a foreign language. For that reason, it is important to instill writing practices into students since the first stages of the learning process.

Assessing Speaking: another hard task

When talking about assessing my students' performance, I have always found that the speaking and writing part are the most difficult ones to grade; and I had not stopped to think of the reason why that was happening to me. It is just now that I start to realize that the main problem for that was the lack of setting the objectives and knowing what I really wanted to measure.

I had not taught for a long time, and when I did it, it was just like for 6 months, but after having to design some tests and having to grade them I noticed that I was not doing the right thing. In the case of speaking, I made some mistakes such as:

·        I did not know what I wanted my students to do: I just came up with the 20 questions I was asked to submit with the test. I started to review the book and make all the possible questions but I did not focus on the functions I wanted my students to perform.

·        I did not have a good organization: I did not set a time limit for everyone. Some of them had more time, some of them less.

·        It became a mess when I had to grade because I did not know what to grade and how much “points” I should give to pronunciation, how much to fluency or how much to grammar.

·        As a consequence of the former, my subjectivity started to appear but not in a good way. Honestly, I was not being fair with some students. After having graded everyone’s speaking performance I started to compare results and I started to think like this: This student has 4 and he is not good when performing during the class, but this other one had 3.2 and he is very good, so at the end I started to give more points to the second one in order for him to have a better grade; and to take away points from the first one, just like that, without reasons.

 I think I am not the only one who has felt this way, and I have been able to reflect on that thanks to the information of the book we have been reading. Now I am sure I will spend more time designing my tests, I will do my best at planning the goals I want my students to achieve, and not only with the speaking, but with all the skills, I will try to take into account different performances of my student during their process when evaluating, instead of being focused on only one piece of information.

Principles of language assessment

A reflection

As time has gone by and new methodologies on education have been implemented, I have seen (like all of you) how different ways of teaching, different materials, and technologies have taken place in the classroom in order to improve the teaching and learning process. However, I think that talking about assessment we are a little behind and we still, as teachers and as students, continue evaluating and being evaluated in the same ways than some years before. 

It is common to find that kind of tests where students are asked to fill in blanks with memorized vocabulary that may not be meaningful, or with conversations that never happen in the real world; also, tests with readings that have nothing to do with the contents of the syllabus or long tests that make students race against the clock. These are examples of tests that do not fulfill one or more of the five principles of language assessment mentioned by Brown (2000), which are:

Practicality: a practical test is not very expensive, it is easy to administer, it doesn’t consume lots of time neither for the student to take it nor for the examiner to evaluate it.

Reliability: a reliable test is consistent. It means that if you administer the same test to the same student or group of students on two different occasions, the test should have similar results.

Validity: it refers to the extent to which the judgments made from assessment results are appropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment. A valid test should measure what it really wants to evaluate.

Authenticity: an authentic test is one that measures with tasks that can be enacted in the real world.

Washback: effective tests have an effect on teaching and learning.

If these are the characteristics of good and effective tests, I have to say that the ones that I have been evaluated with have not fulfilled the five principles. Some of them did not have any relationship with real tasks, others did not measured what they were supposed to evaluate; and some others were excessively expensive or time consuming. Also, after reading this chapter, I realized that many of the exams that I have designed have not had all the principles, and sometimes as a beginner teacher I only tried to meet the requirements and to design tests because the due date was coming and I had to do it without really think of the effectiveness that they could have on students’ performance.

Now, after the reading and the reflection done, I know that it is important to think of different aspects when designing an exam. It is not only a matter of finding out how to evaluate all the contents seen in class, but it is also important to try to keep the balance with all the five principles in order to make effective tests.