Final Paper

Sara María Servín Ferreira

Licenciatura de la Enseñanza del inglés
University of Guanajuato
Teacher Darcy Stock
May 07th, 2023
Reflection

The purpose of this final paper is to analyze and reflect on the tools of assessment
that I created during the semester. In this analysis, I would make an emphasis in my
experience with the creation of two of these assessments, the challenges and difficulties I
had, the things that I learned during the process of creation, and the things I can improve to
make my evaluations better.

First, let’s talk about my listening assessment. For the creation of this assessment, I
made five multiple-choice questions about a listening of 4:07 minutes from BBC Radio,
that talked about the adjectives with -ed and -ing. For the context of this activity, I chose a
beginner's classroom (A2) in a private school in Guanajuato for the ages of 15 and 18 years
old.

In my experience with this assessment, I had some difficulties with the elaboration
of the questions and the selection of the audio. Listening is a very hard skill to evaluate.
According to Huebener (1969), as cited in Kim (2004), listening comes first when
acquiring a foreign language, therefore students need to be well-prepared in listening skills.

During the discussions in class, the creation of questions was something that
preoccupied me since they were supposed to be reliable, therefore the multiple-choice
answers had to be well thought out, and no more than one option could be correct. One
thing that I learned from this assignment was that there are a lot of things to think about
when creating multiple-choice questions. One can think that because they are the easiest to
answer they will be easy to create, but they are not. They must be carefully analyzed for
them to be valid and reliable. I struggled a lot with choosing the multiple-choice answers
because I didn't want two possible correct answers. This task was the only one I made with
the purpose of doing a washback session and giving them feedback about their mistakes.

Other things that I learned were the types of assessments and the types of listening. I
chose to create an achievement type of assessment of intensive listening. This means that I
create an activity made to measure the ability of the students to listen to a short audio and
make an analysis of the language used in it. The purpose of the task is to see if the
objectives of the unit were reached (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). Another thing learned
is the benefits of doing a one-way listening task. Students are more focused on the things
they need to hear and retain. As presented by Chu (2016) the purpose of doing this type of
task is to make students only focus on receiving input and do not preoccupy with having to
interact.

The things I can improve in this task are first, to build a better justification for the
British accent used in my audio. The accent of the audio is British, and this is something
that can prejudice the performance of my students during the evaluation, therefore it must
be important to determine why is this helpful to students. Second, the activity needs more
content validity in order to give full validity points to my evaluation.

The second paper I want to analyze is my writing assessment. For this task, I created
a writing activity with a value of 20% in the student’s final grade. The context of my class
is in a private school in Guanajuato with students between the ages of 18 and 22 years old
with an intermediate level (B2). In this activity, I ask my students to write an expository
essay of 1,000 to 1,500 words about the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential
impact on society. To provide my students with an equal amount of information, before
they start writing their essays, I show them two videos from TED Ed about this topic.

In my experience with this assessment, I struggled a little bit more with the making
of it than with the listening task. And that is because of the creation of the rubric. For this
assignment, it is needed a rubric in order to grade my student's performance. Before this, I
had never done a rubric, so I had a lot of doubts about it. I didn’t know how to start or what
would be beneficial to my students. I wanted to create an easy-to-read rubric,
understandable and not scary. So, I decided to make an analytical rubric inspired by the
IELTS rubric. The IELTS rubric had nine bands to grade, four types of criteria to evaluate,
and one to four sentences in each description. In my rubric, instead of nine bands, I
integrated five, and the criteria points instead of four, are six (Appendix 1). As I stated in
my third evaluation task, it is a good idea to make an analytical rubric for my expository
essay activity because it is possible to make a more extensive evaluation of the writing.

After deciding that my rubric would be like that, I started to choose the criteria that I
would test. First, I enlisted all the criteria that I could ask for and chose the ones I wanted to
focus on. Second, I read all the micro and macro skills and pick four of them. Finally, I put
together the criteria with the micro and macro skills and created the six aspects I would be
focusing on. The criteria that I picked are the following: topic, grammar and vocabulary
range, organization, punctuation, style, coherence, and cohesion.

Then, the next obstacle I had while creating the rubric was the elaboration of the
description of each criterion. It was hard to put everything I wanted to test, in a clear and
not confusing way that all my students can understand, in just one or two sentences.

Finally, the five bands integrated into the rubric, I reduced them to 0-1, 2-3, and 4-5.
This was in order to only create three descriptions per criteria, but this ended to be one of
the things I need to improve in my assessment. I thought it would be easier for me to grade
my students with the option of putting them .5 or having a scale of one point in each
description of the aspect evaluated, but it turned out to be harmful because this can make
my rubric not very reliable. How would students know why they only got half of the point?

Another thing I struggled with was deciding the topic of the essay; I didn’t know
what I wanted to evaluate but I knew I wanted my activity to be authentic and useful for my
students in their daily life. I picked the topic “The rise of artificial intelligence and its
potential impact on society” because students will likely listen to or read about this topic in
their daily life since artificial intelligence has become trending in the past months and
would continue to be a relevant topic in human history.

The things that I learned with the creation of this assessment are a lot. The first I
want to address is the efficacy of using expository essays with students, so they improve
their abilities to investigate a topic, analyze evidence, expand on the idea, and present an
argument concerning that theory (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.). Then, the micro and
macro skills are very important to know what is that you want to assess. The four skills that
I chose for this activity were the following: the use of appropriate grammatical systems and
cohesive techniques to ensure the accuracy of grammar and vocabulary, the capacity to
execute the communication functions of written texts in accordance with form and purpose,
and “convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main
idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and
exemplification” (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019).
 The type of task chosen was a responsive task and I learned that it gives students the
chance to express their own opinions on a certain subject, which helps with critical thinking
skills. It also asks students to reflect on the topic and do some research to acquire
knowledge and it is adapted to the needs and preferences of the students in order to boost
motivation and involvement in the learning process (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). The
importance of text-based prompts and the use of multimedia or visuals as a type of prompt
is something I also learned during this assignment. According to Hyland (2003), a prompt
is a stimulus that a learner is expected to respond to and can consist of both input data and
contextual resources. Douglas (2000), mentioned in Hyland (2003), stated that the input
data is visual and/or auditory information that must be processed. Giving my students a
visual prompt makes the information easier to retain and gives my students the same
schemata from which they can begin to work from.

The things I can improve for this is, as I presented previously the bands integrated
to grade my rubric was a mistake, I would change them to only three. Also, I would
improve my pre-writing activity, give them a clearer idea of how I want the structure of the
expository essay and do a question activity to engage the students more with the topic.

For this paper, I chose to analyze these assessments because the listening
assessment was the first that I wrote and in which I had a lower grade so I wanted to see
how I could improve it and make a better evaluation with the experience I gained
throughout the semester. The second that I chose was the writing assessment because it is
the task I presented in my microteaching, and I had some improvements in mind for the
activity, therefore, I wanted the opportunity to express them in this paper.
 References

Brown, H. D., & Abeywickrama, P. (2019). Language assessment (3rd ed). Principles and
Classroom Practices. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education.

Cecilia Chu (2016) Teaching listening: one-way listening. ELT Forward.

Expository Essays - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University (n.d.).

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/essay_writing/
expository_essays.html

Hyland, K. (2003). Second language writing. Cambridge university press

Kim, J. H. (2004). Intensive or Extensive Listening for L2 Beginners? English teaching-

anseonggun-, 59. 93-114.
Appendix 1