Name : Levia Salsabillah

NIM : 210210401074

Chapter 7
Monitoring and Assessment

Types of Monitoring and Assessment

The purpose of the monitoring and assessment part of curriculum design is to make sure that
the learners will get the most benefit from the course.
1. Placement assessment The learners are assessed at the beginning of a course to see what
level of the course they should be in, and it is usually occurs under environment constraints. It
is used to decide what level of the course a learner should enter, what class the learner should
join, and whether the learner should join the course at all.
Possible placement tests:
1) The Eurocentres Vocabulary Test, This test takes about ten minutes to sit and is
automatically scored by the computer that administers it (Meara and Buxton, 1987).
2) The Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1990; Schmitt et al., 2001), Designed to see where
learners needed to develop their vocabulary knowledge and thus is basically a diagnostic
test.
3) Structured interviews, In a structured interview, the learners are interviewed individually.
The interviewer has a series of questions, beginning with common short questions and
moving gradually to more complex questions or commands.
4) A cloze test, Particularly one where the deleted words are selected by the test maker.
Although the cloze is considered to be a reasonable test of general language proficiency, a
selective cloze can focus on particular aspects of vocabulary and grammar.
5) Sentence completion, Allen’s (1970) “thumbnail test of English competence” is a modest
example of this. Example:
I have been here___
Since you are late we___
2. Observation of learning While the course is running, the activities that the learners do are
carefully monitored to see if each particular activity is likely to achieve its learning goal. This
involves technique analysis and classroom observation. It is does not assess the learners but is
directed towards the tasks that they do. The purpose of the monitoring is to see if it is
necessary to make changes to the learning activities in order to encourage learning.
There are four questions that should be asked when observing learning activities (Nation,
2001: 60–74).
1) What is the learning goal of the activity?
2) What are the learning conditions that would lead to the achievement of this goal?
3) What are the observable signs that these learning conditions are occurring?
4) What are the design features of the activity that set up the learning conditions or that need
to be changed to set up the learning conditions?
3. Short-term achievement assessment It is called “achievement” assessment because it
examines items and skills drawn from the course. At regular intervals during the course, the
learners may be monitored to see what they are learning from the course. It is occur on a daily
or weekly basis.
4. Diagnostic assessment In order to plan a programme, it is useful to know where learners’
strengths and weaknesses lie and where there are gaps in their knowledge.
5. Achievement assessment Usually at the end of a course, and perhaps at one or two other
points during the course, the learners are assessed on what they have learned from the course.
6. Proficiency assessment Tries to measure a learner’s language knowledge in relation to other
learners who may have studied different courses, or in relation to areas of language
knowledge that are based upon an analysis of the language. Proficiency assessment has the
goal of seeing where learners have reached in their knowledge of the language.