WEEK 13

Issues in assessing children’s language learning

• Factors that you might take into consideration when assessing young learners:

• Age (motor, linguistic, social development)

• Content of language learning (oral skills, vocabulary development, lg. use at discourse level)

• Methods of teaching (games, songs, stories)

• Aims (language learning aims)

• Learning theories (ZPD, learning through social interaction…)

The social realities of assessment

• It is reasonable to think that assessment should serve teaching:

• by providing feedback on pupils’ learning

• By making the next teaching more effective

• In practice:

• Assessment drives teacher to teach what is going to be assessed

• In the world of foreign language teaching, assessment, in the form of testing, has become a multi-million global
business, in which the need for internationally recognised certification of language proficiency is growing

• As a result of this, the test are becoming progressively complexified with concepts and techniques that a regular
language teacher can hardly understand

• This impact of assessment on learning has an impact on individual learners:

• Stress is placed on children by the demands of assessment

• Individual children’s learning needs are downgraded in the push to cover the syllabus

• Classroom activity is restricted to test preparation

• Educational change is limited by the power of assessment machinery

• However, not all effects of assessment are negative:

• Children will encounter stress anyway in their educational life

• Well-designed assessment at young age may help them learn how to cope with more stressful
examinations later in life

• Innovative testing can increase attention to neglected aspects of learning (oral skills)
 • Comparison of school results may highlight where pupils are underachieving and lead to improvements
in learning opportunities

Classroom realities

• When we move from macro-level to what actually happens in schools and classrooms, we find evidence of
further conflicts:

• The focus for most of the assessment was on children’s achievement in language learning and never on
circular aims such as increased language awareness and social awareness

• The most frequently used method of assessment is paper-pencil test (testing vocabulary and grammar)

• Paper-pencil test contrasts vividly with the classroom experience of children who have learnt language
through songs and stories

• Almost no tests focus on spontaneous speaking (it is much easier to create a written test than
assessment of spoken language)

Principles for assessing children’s language learning

1. Assessment should be seen from a learning centered perspective

Learning-centred perspective

 Is a foreign language teaching that has children’s learning at the centre, trying to understand how
classrooms activities and talks will be experienced by children
 Vygotskyan perspective- we do not get a true assessment of a child’s ability by measuring what she/he can
do alone without help
 What a child can do with helpful others predicts next stage in learning and gives better assessment of
learning

2. Assessment should support learning and teaching

With learning being the central concern-then assessment should contribute to the learning process

Metaphor of plant growth:

 The plant develops through the nutrients it absorbs from its environment and different types of growth
occur at different points in its life cycles.

 Assessment asks how well the plant is growing

 Is growth just about the height of the plant?

 Growth is about the strengths of its root system, the quality of its leaves, the number and richness of the
flowers

Positive effects of assessment on learning and teaching:

  The process and outcomes of assessment can motivate learners

 An assessment activity can provide a helpful model of language use

 An assessment activity, and feedback from it, can support further learning

 The outcomes of assessment can help teacher plan more effective lessons

 The outcomes of assessment can inform the evaluation and improvement of courses and programs

3. Assessment is more than testing

 A skilled teacher continuously assesses pupil’s learning through what she/he notices and how she/he
interprets these information in lights of knowledge and experience
 It is not necessary to test children to see how much they have learned- there are less
invasive/alternative techniques such as observations, portfolios and self-assessment

4. Assessment should be congruent with learning

 Congruent- it means to fit comfortably with children’s learning experience

 This principle suggests that assessment should be, like teaching, more interactional, rather than isolated
experience
 Social interaction is often neglected in assessment

5. Children and parents should understand assessment issues

 Teachers are restricted in individual decisions when it comes to testing

 There are national regulations that they must follow
 Parents want the best for their children
 But often they want everything the same as it was in their own schooling
 Parents need to know what teachers are doing and why
 Parental support to teachers is necessary

Assessment – testing – evaluation

• Assessment is concerned with pupils’ learning or performance, and thus provides one type of information that
might be used in evaluation

• Test are just one technique or method of assessment that is concerned with measuring learning through
performance

• Evaluation refers to a broader notion than assessment, and refers to a process of systematically collecting
information in order to make a judgment

– what do you think about this?

Assessment - OCENA – Test – TEHNIKA – Evaluation - PROCENA

Formative & summative assessment

• Formative assessment aims to inform on-going teaching and learning by providing immediate feedback
 • Give example of formative assessment

• Summative assessment aims to assess learning at the end of the unit, term, year, a course, and does not
feedback into the next round of teaching

Validity

• How valid is this test for vocabulary?

• We show children various pictures of objects to name in the foreign language as a test of vocabulary.

• Can there be a problem?

• Rather than just testing knowledge of someone’s vocabulary items, tests also test knowledge of another
culture.

• To make sure that assessment is as valid as possible we need to think very carefully about what exactly we
want to assess, what exactly the proposed assessment will assess, and what can be claimed from the outcome
of the assessment.

Reliability

• Reliability measures how well a test or assessment assesses what it claims to

 • When applied to tests that produce numerical marks, reliability can be checked by statistical comparison
of performances on two similar tests a few days apart

• Validity and reliability can be conflicting needs for assessment techniques and procedures

• The most reliable assessment is paper-pencil assessment in which each item measures only a single aspect of a
skill and which gives each testee a numerical mark.

• The most valid assessment will be the one that collects a lot of information about performance on several
aspects of a skill

• When validity is increased – reliability decreases

Fairness?

• Assessment in children’s language learning can influence whether or not pupils choose to continue learning the
foreign language or whether they lose interest and motivation

• Because assessment has such a powerful effect on children’s lives, issues of fairness need to be taken seriously

• The types of questions, test items, or assessment tasks should also be familiar to pupils, if they are to show their
ability to best advantage.

• E.g. children who haven’t played games in their classrooms would be at a severe disadvantage if tested through
game like activities.

Teacher assessment of language learning

• Assessing in relation to goals

• By making goals explicit we have a check on the potential value of each lesson to the pupils

Example:

• A goal:

• Learning the names of animals, assessment might be done during teaching using simple techniques such
as:
 • Assessment by observation is one of the most useful assessment techniques to use with children because it
does not disturb the children and allows them to be assessed in the process of ordinary classroom activities

Observe – notice – adjust teaching

• The most common way of recording observations of children’s performance is through a check-list on which a
teacher simply ticks when a pupil has achieved a goal

• Self-assessment

• the benefits of self-assessment are easily stated, but need some thought as to their applicability for
young learners of foreign language

The importance of self-assessment

• Learners can understand more about the learning process

• Learners can be motivated towards more involvement in their learning

• Teacher can understand more about individual pupils

• Learner will be better prepared to carry on learning, beyond the classroom

• A more equal relationship is created between teachers and learners

Portfolio assessment

• a portfolio is a collection of examples of work that, as a collection, reveal both the capability and the progress of
a learner

• A limitation of portfolio assessment in language teaching is its application to oral skills development

- Portfolios are paper-based and suited to collecting written texts

Outcomes of assessment

• Summative assessment techniques, such as tests, produce outcomes in the form of grades, marks, and ranking
of students

• It can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a course or programme

• It provides ranking of students; it can be used for placement purposes (deciding about the choice of
school, class…)

Outcomes of assessment

• Formative assessment is intended to make a difference to teaching and learning

• Observations, portfolios, checklists… offer information that can be converted into feedback for parents,
pupils and other teachers
 • Formative assessment can influence how the next lesson or unit is planned by the language teacher

Making the feedback helpful

• If assessment feedback is to be helpful to learners and improve their learning, it needs to be specific
and detailed, and related to target performance

• Target performance (which may be present as a list of criteria, or an example of exemplary

performance) offers learners the opportunity to see what they are aiming at

• Feedback should help learners to compare their current performance to target performance

Learner understands the target

performance

Learner compares target and current performance

Learner closes the gap between target and current performance

• The target performance could be modeled by the teacher, or by pupils

• In teaching languages to young learners the teacher can intervene and help the learners to close the gap in
several ways:

• Corrective feedback

(by correcting their language use towards the target language)

• Evaluative feedback

Includes a judgement on the pupil’s performance – that was very good! I liked the way you said the sentence clearly!

• Strategic feedback

offers advice of what to do to improve performance – it can be done in a mother tongue

WEEK 14