TASK 2: ASSESSMENT AND TESTING

I Read the text:

Chapter 12, ‘Assessment and Testing’, in ‘A Course in Language Teaching’ by Penny Ur.

II Answer the 12 questions on page 183-184.

1. Summative assessment may be used as a basis selection, as final school grades. It is carried out by a teacher or an
external authority. In contrast, the formative assessment happens in the middle of a period of learning and
provides clear feedback and suggestions for improvement.
2. Some disadvantages of tests are that they’re not always valid, they may not be reliable, they are one-off events
which might not give a fair representation of the student’s ability, they discriminate against students with test
anxiety regarding the conditions and can be extremely stressful for the students.
3. It can be used for teacher assessment, continuous assessments or self-assessment.
4. Criterion-referenced assessment judge the student with some fixed criterion according to their age, career, level,
stage of a course, etc, the norm- referenced assessment evaluates the student’s performance according to what
you expect from the group and individual- reference assessment means that the teacher relates the assessment
of an individual student to his or her own previous performance.
5. Probably with evaluative comments, to motivate the student to keep going. They would know their grades but
accompany it with encouraging and constructive comments.
6. Some important criterias are: What will it tell me about the student’s knowledge?How easy is it to compose?How
easy is it to check? and can it be used in the design of a computer test?
7. An advantage is that the student has 25% of getting it right by chance and is more reliable. Nevertheless, It can
have more than one possible answer, and the punctuation and aligning of the ‘stem’ can be tricky.
8. Gapfill, matching, rewrite, transformation, wordsearch and true-false.
9. We can test reading comprehension by asking them to read aloud, present a text plus comprehension questions
or using cloze.
10. Time is a problem for testing speaking, but with interviews or interaction in small groups gives time enough to
test all the class. A presentation also can be a problem if the student memorizes the speech or read it but a good
alternative is to give a student a topic and give them 3 or 4 minutes to think about and speak.
11. For writing we can evaluate appropriate content, if the content is related to the topic and if the student organizes
the ideas logically.
12. Tests can provoke a lot of anxiety in students before a test, but what may help is to inform the students in
advance when the test will be. Discuss the topics every class so they can feel prepared and review the materials
any time they need to.

III Develop the task on page 174:

Choose five test items from the list below, and comment on them based on the following questions:

a) What will it tell me about the student’s knowledge? True or false check their receptive knowledge. Matching
can show their knowledge about collocations and grammatical cohesion. Dictation may check their spelling,
punctuation and their listening comprehension. Focused cloze can test their grammar, vocabulary, spelling or
punctuation. And transformation would demonstrate their knowledge to produce correct forms.
b) How easy is it to compose? T or F may be easy, composed of two options, true or false or ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Marching isn’t very difficult, but teachers need to take care that there is only one right ‘match’ for each item.
Dictation isn’t very easy to compose, the teacher should be careful of how much ‘weight’ would have the
different mistakes. For transformation, it is also difficult to find the alterations such as changing tenses or
voice.
c) How easy is it to check? True or false, easy, just has one correct answer. Matching too. Dictation can be
difficult to check according to what kind of mistakes the students can have. Focused cloze may be difficult in
 deciding what specific item is acceptable or not. And transformation can be easy to check but the student
can have a good performance without knowing the meaning of the target language.
d) Can it be used in the design of a computer test? Yes it can. The students have to read and answer the
statements or questions behind, there will be a space or blanks to answer. Also, every adjustment can be
recorded by online platforms, making the process more fluent.

IV Design one activity for each of the 13 items in the book, do it in base of the following text:

Reading activity:

I) Write a T (true) or F (false) according to the text My first job offer. Justify the false ones.

1.- ________ The text is about writing a CV, its structure and main aspects.

_____________________________________________________________

2.- ________ The young worker is 15 years old.

_____________________________________________________________

3.- ________ The person did not answer any questions , and was really sure about being hired by the company.

____________________________________________________________

4.- ______ The salary of the employee is unknown.

____________________________________________________________

II) Write in 50 words what you think that will happen the first Monday as a new employee.