Assessment

"When students become the owners of their own learning, assessment becomes a tool for reflection and growth."

– Susan Brookhart

The palette of language teaching and design is not complete without assessments that gather information about learners’ language abilities and progress throughout instruction (Bachman & Damböck, 2018). Yet assessments are daunting for students and can provoke a fear of failure as they approach a defining moment in their language studies. Through LT 549 (Measuring Language Abilities), I learned that it is important to mitigate these anxiety-provoking measures by implementing strategies that would ensure beneficial washback through formative feedback, thus promoting students' learning (Messick, 1996; Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). Furthermore, I learned that it is important to examine language assessment as a process, where results are used to make decisions and adaptations in classroom teaching. During my time as an early childhood educator, the only formal assessments I conducted were the “Ages and Stages Questionnaire” (ASQ-3) and the “Assessment, Evaluation, and Programming System for Infants and Children,” (AEPS). These assessments usually took place during the middle of the term and the end of the term and were usually conducted by thorough observations and interactions with the child. Through conducting this kind of assessment, not only are the strengths of each child identified but also the areas where they might need additional support; and thus it will allow me as a teacher to make required changes to the curriculum and also measure a child’s progress across the developmental domains. Throughout my period of study in LTS program, I was able to further enhance my skills in assessing language skills by ensuring that the tasks are valid and reliable measures of language constructs. The artifacts exhibited below demonstrate the various functions of assessments and their importance on language teaching.

The assessment plan that I created for my dual language immersion course in LT 548 showcases various informal and formative assessments within early childhood education. Throughout the school day, children participate in a variety of meaningful and fun activities, where through engagement with their peers in play and storytelling elicitation of the two target languages takes place. Formative assessments allow the teachers to provide feedback through suggestions and call learners’ attention to linguistic errors in a redirecting manner (Andrade & Cizek, 2010). The storytelling activity addresses authenticity (Bachman & Palmer, 1996), by providing a thematic organization to the assessed linguistic items, and contains language that is not only contextualized but also relevant to learners’ interests and needs. The assessment plan for this dual-language course also contains aspects of formal and summative assessments which aim to measure students’ abilities during the middle of the term and at the end of the term and allow the teacher to evaluate the curriculum and whether or not learning objectives were met (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). Through the teacher engaging in prolonged periods of observation, data about the students’ language abilities will allow for the teacher to make necessary adjustments to the curriculum.

LT 548 Assessments Plan Artifact.pdf

LT 548: Dual Language Immersion Course Assessment Plan

Throughout LT 549, I have gained valuable knowledge of how constructing valid and reliable assessments is a crucial component of language teaching. I felt quite hesitant about the idea of administering formal assessments with young learners due to the multitude of issues that arise from administering paper-and-pen tasks with children. However, as demonstrated in my activity creation assessment for listening comprehension I was able to address the concerns of student-related reliability by providing clear expectations and guidelines to the learners. This listening comprehension assessment was constructed for an English language immersion course for kindergarten students in China, who learn the language in a theme-based manner. Through administering this achievement test, the teacher is able to examine whether students were able to achieve the pertaining course goals and objectives of the unit in progress. When designing this assessment I ensured that construct validity (McNamara, 2006) was met by having students select a picture response to demonstrate their comprehension of what was said aloud by their teacher. This assessment also measures students’ ability to distinguish word boundaries and discriminate between the sounds of English. Furthermore, I ensured that this assessment was practical by accounting for the time of administration and ease of scoring (Mousavi, 2009).

LT 549 Assessment Creation Listening.pdf

LT 549: Listening Comprehension Assessment Activity

Another artifact that I constructed in LT 549 is the writing assessment activity which takes place at the end of a unit for kindergarten aged students who are studying English in China. This informal summative writing assessment involved having learners create a comic story and was designed to evaluate learners' use of the vocabulary they have acquired throughout the unit and measure their ability to produce accurate orthographic patterns in the target language. While the administration of this assessment does take time, many students would find the creation of a comic story to be fun and engaging. Assessing writing skills could pose issues of rater reliability due to subjective judgments, and thus through utilizing an analytical rubric, I outlined clear constructs in order to increase inter-rater and intra-reliability (Barkaoui, 2011). The analytical rubric also allows the teacher to provide constructive feedback on each element of their writing and examine the areas that would need to be addressed.

LT 549 Assessment Creation Activity Writing.pdf

LT 549: Writing Assessment Activity

References

Andrade, H., & Cizek, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of formative assessment. Routledge.

Bachman, L., & Damböck, B. (2018). Language assessment for classroom teachers. Oxford University Press.

Barkaoui, K. (2011). Effects of marking method and rater experience on ESL essay scores and rater performance. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18(3), 279-293.

Brown, H. D., & Abeywickrama, P. (2019). Language assessment: Principles and classroom practices. Pearson.

McNamara, T. (2006). Validity in language testing: The challenge of Sam Messick's legacy. Language Assessment Quarterly: An International Journal, 3(1), 31-51.

Mousavi, S. A. (2009). An encyclopedic dictionary of language testing(4th ed.). Tehran, Iran: Rahnama Publications.

Messick, S. (1996). Validity and washback in language testing. Language Testing, 13(3), 241-256.

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