INTRODUCTION: THE

ROLE OF ASSESSMENT
IN
THE LANGUAGE
CLASSROOM

ASSESSING YOUNG
LEARNERS FOR:
 LEARNING
 TEACHING
 RESEARCH
WHAT IS ASSESSMENT?
 Assessment is a popular and sometimes misunderstood term in current
educational practice.
 In an Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language Testing, Mousavi (2009, p. 36) defined assessment
as “appraising or estimating the level or magnitude of some attribute of a person.”
 Mihai (2010) asserted that assessment is “much more than tests and test scores”. Assessment,
according to Mihai, is a combination of all kinds of formal and informal judgments and
findings occurring inside and outside a classroom.
 Brown and Abeywickrama (2010) defined assessment an ongoing process including a wide
range of techniques such as simply making an oral appraisal of a student’s response or jotting
down a phrase to comment on a student’s essay.
 Brown and Abeywickrama (ibid) also stated that “a good teacher never ceases to assess
students, whether those assessments are incidental or intended” (p. 3).
THE ROLE OF ASSESSMENT
IN
THE LANGUAGE
CLASSROOM
 Assessment instruments (formal or informal) serve multiple
purposes.
 Commercially designed and administered tests may be used for
measuring proficiency, placing students into one of several levels of
a course, or diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses
according to specific linguistic categories, among other purposes.
 Classroom-based teacher-made tests might be used to diagnose
difficulty or measure achievement in a given unit of a course.
ASSESSING YOUNG
LEARNERS FOR LEARNING:
 An approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is then used to
improve students' performance. Students become more involved in the learning process
and from this gain confidence in what they are expected to learn and to what standard.
 Assessment for learning is diagnostic and formative for the purposes of greater learning
achievement . It is not used for grading and Report Cards.
 Criterion-referenced – criteria based on prescribed learning outcomes identified in the
provincial curriculum, reflecting performance in relation to a specific learning task
 Involves both teacher and student in a process of continual reflection and review about
progress.
 Teachers adjust their plans and engage in corrective teaching in response to formative
assessment.
ASSESSING YOUNG
LEARNERS FOR TEACHING:
 Martha L. A. Stassen et al. define assessment as “the systematic collection and analysis of
information to improve student learning.” (Stassen et al., 2001, pg. 5)
 This definition captures the essential task of student assessment in the teaching and learning
process.
 Student assessment enables instructors to measure the effectiveness of their teaching by
linking student performance to specific learning objectives.
 As a result, teachers are able to institutionalize effective teaching choices and revise
ineffective ones in their pedagogy.
ASSESSING YOUNG
LEARNERS FOR TEACHING:
 The measurement of student learning through assessment is important because it provides
useful feedback to both instructors and students about the extent to which students are
successfully meeting course learning objectives.
 In their book Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer a framework
for classroom instruction—what they call “Backward Design”—that emphasizes the critical
role of assessment.
 For Wiggins and McTighe, assessment enables instructors to determine the metrics of
measurement for student understanding of and proficiency in course learning objectives.
ASSESSING YOUNG
LEARNERS FOR TEACHING:
 Student assessment also buttresses critical reflective teaching.
 Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, contends that critical
reflection on one’s teaching is an essential part of developing as an educator and
enhancing the learning experience of students.
 Critical reflection on one’s teaching has a multitude of benefits for instructors,
including the development of rationale for teaching practices.

\\hyAccording to Brookfield, “A critically reflective teacher is much better placed to
communicate to colleagues and students (as well as to herself) the rationale behind
her practice. 
ASSESSING YOUNG LEARNERS FOR
RESEARCH:
Why assess young learners?
• To monitor and aid their progress
• To provide children with evidence of their progress and enhance motivation
• To monitor your performance and plan future work
• To provide information for parents, colleagues, and school authorities
What do we assess?
 SKILLS DEVELOPMENT –Listening –Speaking –Reading –Writing –
Integrated skills
 ATTITUDES
 BEHAVIOURAL AND SOCIAL SKILLS
LANGUAGE TESTS
 Tests, on the other, are a subset of assessment. They have administrative procedures
that occur at an identifiable times when learners have mustered all their faculties to
offer peak performance, knowing that their responses are being measured and
evaluated (Brown, 2010)
 Specifying the purpose of an assessment instrument and stating its objectives is an
essential first step in choosing, designing, revising, or adapting procedure you will
finally use.
 Tests tend to fall into a finite number of types, classified according to their purposes.
 There are five types of English language tests:
PROFICIENCY, ACHIEVEMENT, DIAGNOSTIC, LANGUAGE
APTITUDE AND PLACEMENT TESTS.
 TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Proficiency Tests:
TESTS
To test global competence in a language.
To test overall ability.
Traditionally consisted of standardised multiple-choice items on
grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and aural
comprehension.
Almost always summative and norm-referenced (norm-referenced
test is design to measure global language abilities. A student’s
performance is compared to those of all other students in percentile
terms)
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Proficiency Tests:
TESTS
Provide results in the form of a single score (and usually two or three sub scores,
one for each section of a test), which, to many, is sufficient for the gate-keeping
role they play of accepting or denying someone passage into the next level of
education.
A key issue – how the constructs of language ability are specified. The tasks
required to perform must be legitimate samples of English language use in a
defined context.
Time-consuming and costly process.
Thinking questions:
What is a popular example of proficiency test?
What challenges test designers face when creating these types of test?
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Achievement Tests:
TESTS
To measure learners’ ability within a classroom lesson, unit, or even total curriculum.
Limited to particular material addressed in a curriculum within a particular time frame and
offered after a course has focused on the objectives in question.
Also play an important formative role – an effective achievement test offers feedback about the
quality of a learner’s performance in subsets of the unit or course.
Also serve the diagnostic role of indicating what a student needs to continue to work on in the
future, but the primary role is to determine whether course objectives have been met – and
appropriate knowledge and skills acquired – by the end of a given period of instruction.
Often summative – administered at the end of a lesson, unit, or term of study.
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TESTS
Achievement Tests:
The specifications:
The objectives of the lesson, unit, or course being assessed.
The relative importance / weight assigned to each objective.
The tasks employed in classroom lessons during the unit of time.
The time frame for the test and turnaround time.
Its potential for formative feedback.
Range from 5- or 10-minute quizzes to three-hour final examinations, with
variety of item types and formats.
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TESTS
Diagnostic Tests:
To diagnose aspects of a language that a student needs to develop or
that a course should include.
For example: a test in pronunciation – the phonological features of
English. Usually, such tests offer a checklist of features for the
teacher to use in pinpointing difficulties.
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TESTS
Diagnostic Tests:
In comparison:
Achievement tests analyse the extent to which students have
acquired language features that have already been taught.
Diagnostic tests elicit information on what students need to work on
in the future.
Therefore, diagnostic tests should offer more detailed, sub-
categorised information on the learner.
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TESTS
Language Aptitude Tests:
To measure capacity or general ability to learn a foreign language a priori
(before taking the course) and ultimate predicted success in that undertaking.

Ostensibly designed to apply to the classroom learning of any language.

Enjoyed the widespread use once, but no longer now.

TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Language Aptitude Tests:
TESTS
 Students’ performing language-related tasks such as number learning,
distinguishing speech sounds, detecting grammatical functions, and memorising
paired associates.
 The tests did show some significant correlations with ultimate performance of
students in language courses.
 However, there was no research to show unequivocally that those kinds of tasks
predict communicative success in a language.
 Because of these limitations, standardised aptitude tests are seldom used today.
 Instead, attempts to measure language aptitude more often provide learners with
information about their preferred styles and potential strengths and weaknesses,
and strategies to overcome the weaknesses.
TYPES OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Placement Tests:
TESTS
To place a student into a particular level or section of a language curriculum or school.
Usually include a sampling of the material to be covered in the various courses in a curriculum; a
student ‘s performance should indicate the point at which the student will find material neither too
easy nor too difficult but appropriately challenging.
Some achievement tests, and proficiency tests can act as placement tests.
Take a formative role – a tally of correct and incorrect responses, categorised by modules in a
curriculum, provides teachers with useful information on what may or may not need to be
emphasised in the future.
Many varieties – assessing comprehension and production, responding through written and oral
performance, open-ended and limited responses, selection and gap-filling formats – depending on
the nature of a programme and its needs.
CONCLUSION
 As a teacher, in order to design a test for your students, you need to
determine first your purpose from that test.
 Defining the purpose will help you define the kind or type of test
you will be using.
 Defining the type of test will help define the objective and the
outcomes of the test.
REFERENCES:
 http://englishenglish.com/englishtest.htm www.ets.org
Brown, H. Douglas (2010), Language Assessment: Principles and classroom
practices. Pearson Education, Inc.