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.

Assessment, evaluation, testing and grading

A summary

According to Scanlan (2012), there exists a limited conception of the term assessment among many teachers. He pointed out that it is considered as simply “…giving students tests and assigning them grades” (p. 1) while its real meaning involves more than that and has significant importance in the teaching/learning process.

As a general definition, he indicated that assessment is a process that consists of making a judgment of worth of any entity. In the case of the education field, he referred to educational and learner assessment. The first was described as a process that “involves gathering and evaluating data evolving from planned learning activities or programs” (also known as evaluation), and the second defined as a particular type of educational assessment designed with different purposes such as motivating and directing learning, providing feedback to student and providing feedback to teachers and instructors.

After describing the different types of assessment, Scanlan noted the distinction between assessment and evaluation stating that “…it is often said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction” (p. 3). This means that assessment is done during the students learning process in order to improve their performance and evaluation is carried out with the aim of judging the worth of educational activities.

In order to conclude, the author indicated that grading can be considered a component of assessment since it is a judgment of the quality of a student performance, and also described that it is most of the times a formal, summative, final and product oriented judgment (Scanlan, 2012,p. 4).