Chapter # 4: Assessing Writing

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter4

" Assessing Writing " 

This field has been developed considerable  over the time. Students write on a variety of topics while teachers assessed them monitoring the clarity and organization of their message, this includes also the mechanics ( spelling,  capitalization, and punctuation).

It is important to remember that good writing skills are highly sought by hiher education institutions and employers.

Approaches to Writing Assessment

In literature they have discovered that there are two major approaches to writing assessment which are:

1. Indirect Measures of Writing Assessment  it assess correct usage in sentences-level constructions and assess spelling and punctuation via objective formats.  They determine student's knowledge of writing sub-skills such as grammar and sentence construction.

2. Direct Measures of Writing Assessment it assess a student's ability to communicate through the written mode based on the actual production of written texts, also it requires the student to produce the content by finding a way to organize his/her ideas, using appropiate vocabulary,  grammatical conventions and syntax.

Considerations in Designing Writing Assessment Tasks

 

It involves four basic elements

•  Rubric: the instructions
• Prompt: the task
• Expected response: what the teacher intends students to with the task.
• Post- task evaluation: assessing the effectiveness of the writing task.

 Issues in Writing Assessment

1. Time Allacation

2. Process versus product

3. Use of technology

4. Topic Restriction 

Techniques for Assessing Writing

The ESL/EFL literature generally addresses two types of writing-free writng and guided writing. Guided writing,  in contrast,  requires students to manipulate content that is provided in the prompt, usually in the form of a chart or diagram. When refering to this type of writing, the goal is to elicit comparable products from students of different ability levels.

 Different Types of Assessments Include

• Peer Assessment
• Portafolio- Based Assessment
• Marking Procedures for the assessment of writing
• Classroom teacher as Rater
• Multiple Raters
• Responding to Student Writing 

 

Chapter # 3: Assessing Reading

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 3

" Assessing Reading " 

As a teacher you might be facing with the dilemma of testing students'  abilities in reading and listening because we cannot realize what is going on in their minds when they are engage in both skills. During this synopsis you would find current ideas about reading and its subskills as well as strategies for optimal assessment.

According to  Folse (2007) the following are tips that an English Language teacher used with her pupils and have been proved to work effectible, take a look:

•  She covers a range of reading skills  from gist comprehension to scanning for details and inferencing for implied information.
• Shge chooses different text topics and types and uses several passages per test.
• She employs a range of different task types but ensures that students are familiar with them.
• She expects students to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details.
• She asks students to infer the meaning of  unfamiliar words from context.
• She treats grammar as an important part of reading comprehension.
• She tests discourse-level aspects of texts, including text types and  discourse markers.
• She asks students to recognize the  purposes and audiences of texts.
• She encourages critical-thinking skills such as distinguishing fact from opinion.

During our lifetime we encounter lots of reading materials and tasks,  yet it is difficult to define what we mean by reading. Many language teachers now a days agree that reading includes both bottom-pu-skills- recognizing and making sense of letters, words, and sentences- and top-down processing that deals with whole texts. Therefore, reading is regarded said Coombe(2007) as an interactive skill in which the background knowledge that the reader brings to the task is constantly interwoven with the new material.

Since it is not possible to observe reading behavior in a direct manner,  the only thing you get is an idea of how students actually process texts through techniques such as think-aloud prottocols.

There are other important aspects to take into consideration while assessing reading, they are:

* Vocabulary and grammar

*Design taks appropiately according to students needs and level of domain.

*Specifications: which will take in account the content, conditions and the criteria.

*Texts

*Questions

*Formats including multiple choice, True/False, Short answer, sequencing tasks, combination tasks,

Give yourself a chance to identify the potential you have within you by trying this simple considerations.