After taking the LT549-measuring language ability course, through discussing and analyzing different assessment cases with classmates and designing the assessment, I had a more comprehensive understanding of how to formulate, plan, and articulate the role of assessment in a language curriculum. The following were particularly useful in the process: Assessment Justification/AUA (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019), five aspects of assessment (Bachman & Damböck, 2017); Target Language Usage domain&tasks; the purpose of assessment; describe characteristics. These concepts were analyzed and considered when completing the Assessment Creation Activity assignment. I used the same context for the entire series of five ACAs: which was a 300-level university Chinese course provided to students who had reached at least Intermediate-Mid of modern Chinese proficiency at the University of Oregon, which developed students' communicative competence and linguistic skills in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation of classical Chinese by introducing it through literature interpreting, analyzed and helped integrate the daily usage of classical Chinese along with Modern Chinese. Thus, each ACA had different designs and considerations for the language ability of the measure.
First of all, when designing Assessment Creation Activity, after determining the language skills to be assessed, combined with the course learning goal and students learning outcome, the essential concept that came to my mind was the Target Language Usage task and to define areas of language ability to TLU task engages. It was important to be clear and always think about what the assessment was trying to measure, what the assessment takers could do when taking it, and how it related to real-life usages. For example, LT549-Assessment Creation Activity 4: Speaking, my TLU Domain was: Interpreting and using idioms in daily conversation by consciously referring back to classical Chinese lexical meaning and grammar points. The assessment was designed as an interview.
Here let me briefly introduce "idiom": Chinese idioms, which are mostly four-character phrases called Quadra-syllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs). As a Chinese myself, we often habitually quote idioms or sentences from ancient poems/stories in daily conversations, and this kind of special vocabulary and sentences are primarily written in classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is different from modern Chinese. Although they use the same characters, in many cases, the same Chinese character has different meanings between classical Chinese and modern Chinese. For example, the Chinese character "去 qu," in classical Chinese, means "leave somewhere," but in modern Chinese, this character means "go somewhere." It is the same character, but the meanings can be said to be completely opposite between classical and modern Chinese. So when we come across the idiom, "去暗投明 qu an tou ming," which means "leave the dark side and go to the bright side." we need to interpret it with the meaning and grammar of classical Chinese; otherwise, we will misinterpret the meaning of this idiom. It is why I emphasize classical Chinese and modern Chinese in TLU Domain. In order to measure learners' language ability for this TLU Domain, our TLU task must also be aline with it
being able to use and interpret idioms spontaneously;
appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals;
be able to make themselves understood in an interview and communicate ideas and information on familiar topics.
For the interview assessment I designed for LT549-Assessment Creation Activity 4: Speaking, the teacher would assign students into pairs and use the recorder to record their conversation for later grading. The students would both present to be interviewer and interviewee. When designing this activity, I paid attention to its practicality. When I decided to use the recorder because this was a small class with only 15-20 students, the teacher would have time to watch the interview videos of the students individually and then give them marks according to the rubric. At the same time, since the whole class was tested in groups at the same time, the time saved could also be counted as the teacher's grading time. When it came to the rubric, I had to mention reliability. The rubric consistently measured the skills and content we wanted to cover for this course based on the SLOs. The instructions were clear and easy to follow; however, the ambient noise might cause difficulty in recording the interview, which would be an environmental effect we needed to consider. In addition, from the perspective of washback, this assessment would bring positive consequences to students. For example, students would understand how OPI works and can review their performance by watching the recording and the teacher's feedback on the rubric. It was not only to practice the OPI test but also to align with our course goal, which was to integrate classical and modern Chinese into daily communication.
Its authenticity is my favorite for the LT549-Assessment Creation Activity 5: Pragmatics. This assessment was a vocabulary corpus pragmatic usage report to check how well the students had mastered defining and distinguishing the implied meaning of words that contained the same lexical meaning but demonstrated power and politeness differences from a pragmatic perspective in daily communication. In this assessment, students needed to find a pair or trio of this kind of vocabulary, explain the different pragmatic usages among them, and give examples. Of course, the vocabulary needed to be from the stories they covered in class. The main thing here was to limit the scope of their vocabulary search and closely integrate it with the curriculum. When conducting the sample usages, students were allowed to use the BCC corpus to find the information of each vocabulary, such as frequency, concordance, and word cloud. The teacher would teach them how to use this website in class. All the information here came from the records of people using the vocabulary in daily life, so by comparing this practical information, students could try to summarize the rules of word usage first, and in the follow-up report scoring, they could also read the teacher's feedback to know how they had summarized the vocabulary usage.
In the LT539 Lesson Plan 2, I used most formative assessments to measure how well students were learning in the class. For example, the teacher would form students into pairs and ask them to follow the instructions on the practice sheet and complete the task. Students needed to read the sentences and find out the correct thought groups. While working in groups, the teacher would walk around to give timely feedback or help students who needed more support. In this case, the assessment was informal. Formative assessments could also be formal, such as graded assignments on which the teacher could provide feedback comments. When choosing the type of assessment, we should consider what the assessment was aiming to measure and the purpose of using the information. In conclusion, the concepts we learned about assessment gave me a framework that let me apply later when designing assessments and thinking about how to better measure students' language ability from a more comprehensive structure and align it with SLOs.
References
Bachman, L. & Damböck, B. (2017). Language assessment for classroom teachers. Oxford University Press.
Brown, H. D. & Abeywickrama, P. (2019). Language assessment: Principles and classroom practices (3rd edition). Pearson Education