Peculiarities of language teaching and assessment

Abstract: This article deals with the assessment that has a role to play in motivation, self-reflection and wash back. Good assessment can even provide opportunities for learning: In our view the main purpose of language testing is to provide opportunities for learning both for the students who are being tested and for the professionals who are administering the tests. Assessment is a very broad term that can cover formal exams and tests, both external and internal, which are structured and built into the fabric of the academic year, as well as more informal types of assessment that teachers undertake as a part of their day-to-day practice. One of the biggest and most obvious changes that has happened to assessment is that there is now much more interest in the area of formative assessment. In other words, we assess students at different stages and provide feedback that they can use to improve, re-draft or change what they are currently working on, but also to help them into their future learning (often referred to as feed-forward). Key to this change is an understanding that assessment is part of the learning cycle. In other words, for students to improve, they need to take the information from assessments and use it to improve their work. This immediately makes the feedback provided from assessments a vital cog in the process. It is the feedback and information from assessments that will help students improve. This shift is not easy. Both teachers and students struggle with providing good formative feedback.

Assessment has a role to play in motivation, self-reflection and wash back (we will talk more about the terminology in the next section). However, not only has our understanding of what skills and knowledge we need to be effective language users changed, and hence what we assess, but the way we assess has also changed. This is because our understanding of what assessment is and how to assess effectively has also developed. This changing in our understanding of the nature of assessment covers topics like who does the assessment, where it happens, who uses the assessment and when it happens. We understand that many different stakeholders may want to use the information gathered from assessments. We no longer take the narrow view that they are just for students and teachers. We also understand that a simple mark or score does not fully represent a real picture of a student’s language ability. Even the goals of assessment have changed. It isn’t about simply evaluating a student’s level. In fact, good assessment can even provide opportunities for learning: In our view the main purpose of language testing is to provide opportunities for learning both for the students who are being tested and for the professionals who are administering the tests.(Tomlinson, 1995: 39)Technology is another area that is having a direct impact on language assessment. Technology can offer affordances that provide new ways of assessing. We can now assess and evaluate students in ways that simply were not available to us even ten years ago. We can video our students interacting in groups or even working on a monologue or story. We can get our students to record podcasts and audio files. We can get them to develop their written work in blogs and wikis. There is an abundance of tools that can be used in assessment and these broaden the types of assessment tasks we can create as well as offer quicker and easier ways to distribute them. So assessment has changed. It has changed because firstly the skills and content of any modern language course have changed and because what we understand about the nature of assessment has also changed. It has also changed because of the impact of technology and the affordances that it offers, but that is still not the full picture. There are other ‘drivers’ that are also influencing both the way we teach and learn a language, and the way we assess it. Many of these have their roots in the changes that are taking place in mainstream education and not just language education. We know that the move towards a more communicative view of language learning began to emerge in the 1960s but the changes did not stop there. Over the next 50 years, a whole range of ideas in mainstream education began to impact on language learning and on assessment too. For example, the importance of autonomous learning, learning based around tasks and real situations, the ideas around constructivism, the role self-reflection and peer reflection can play in learning, and the issue of motivation to name just a few (Stoynoff, 2012). We need to consider the influence of all these areas if we are to develop a clear picture of why assessment has changed and how we might effectively assess in the 21st Century language class.

The first presents the key factors that have influenced the way assessment has changed. It breaks down the influences into four areas, which in reality often merge. Firstly, the changes in language teaching; secondly, the changes in our understanding of assessment; thirdly, the impact technology has had; and finally, other drivers from mainstream education that have influenced our views on assessment. It includes a series of short case studies, which provide real examples of the types of assessments that teachers are currently experimenting with using ICT. It is hoped that the practical examples set in the real lives of teachers in their contexts will offer you some useful ideas for adaptation for your own assessment practices.

Assessment is a very broad term that can cover formal exams and tests, both external and internal, which are structured and built into the fabric of the academic year, as well as more informal types of assessment that teachers undertake as a part of their day-to-day practice. We recognize that tests and exams set both internally and externally by organizations such as UCLES have changed in major ways over the past 50 years; however, most teachers have little say in the exams offered by an institution since exams are generally set at institutional level or run by external exam bodies. Our focus, then, is on the types of assessments that the teacher can set while teaching a course.

These are often less formal and may not even be part of the official evaluation of a student but because the teacher has control over these and has a much clearer idea of learners’ needs at any point in a course of study, it is our view that these types of assessments have an important impact on a student’s learning. We provide a series of mini case studies or snapshots throughout this chapter. We spoke to a total of about 20 teachers and drew from some of their examples, as well as our own. Some interesting points emerged from the discussions that we had and it is worth pointing these out right from the start. We believe that this will help paint a much more real picture of what teachers are doing and perhaps provide encouragement to those teachers who are potentially reticent or worried about incorporating ICT into the assessment they do:

■■e-assessment is still in its infancy and it is almost always experimental.

■■Teachers often start with a tool that helps to broaden the skills base of their assessments. For example, they might introduce videoing a pair work activity or getting the students to keep a blog. Often the motivation is to broaden what they are assessing.

■■The process tends to be developmental. Changing assessment procedures can be quite complex, so teachers might start by introducing a technology into their assessment to broaden the base, then later they might look at improving the evaluation criteria that goes with the assessment and later still they might look at the feedback they are providing. So, for example, they might start by getting their students to blog. Once they feel they have got the blog task right, they might start to look at the assessment criteria for the blog and then perhaps the feedback they are providing. The process is generally done in stages with the focus shifting as the teachers get

Once teachers build their confidence they tend to become more experimental and make use of a greater number of tools. We hope that through the ‘snapshots’ of real-life practice we can build towards a set of e-assessment design principles. We really hope that once you have read this chapter you might have a clearer understanding of why assessment is changing and some ideas about how to introduce assessments that include an ICT component.

Before we look at why assessment has changed, we want to cover some of the terminology associated with assessment. We deal with a number of terms like summative, formative, portfolios, wash back, peer evaluation, self-evaluation and reflection, but before we start it is worth just contextualizing where assessment sits in the learning cycle.

The evaluation and feedback of the assessments is also important. The feedback could be provided by other students, it could even be practiced by the students themselves and so encourage self-assessment. What emerge from this process is a picture of the students’ development and a better understanding of whether the content of the course is achieving its outcomes. In light of what we learn about learners’ performance during the learning cycle changes may need to be made to the content of the course.

For example, that the teacher is focusing on writing. The objective is to make the students more fluent in their writing and to get them to focus on the process of writing, as well as the end product. Various activities are set up in the class to support this, including the students writing regular blog posts after their ELT classes. As part of the assessment, students are asked to do a free writing exercise where each week they reflect on the following things:

1. What have you learned this week? What topics have you covered?
2. What things were new to you: grammar, lexis, ideas, content?
3. What specific vocabulary have you learned and can remember?
4. What haven’t you understood from this week? What things do you need to do additional work on, or revise?
5. How do you feel about your general progress this week? How well have you worked? What factors influenced how much you worked?

This work is read by the teacher but not marked. The teacher leaves occasional encouraging comments after the blog entries, providing guidance on how to improve and what to think about. In the blog posts students are expected to reflect on what they learn in class and consider the questions. So the assessment is doing much more than simply helping to gauge and evaluate the student’s progress, it is also helping them to reflect on their own learning, think about their own progress and what they are learning. It has the additional benefit of helping the students learn about blogging, a skill that could be useful to them in the future; it enhances their digital literacy.

At the end of the process the teachers may become aware of various problems on the course. They may have noticed in the students’ reflections that there are certain things the students feel they have not learned properly. The teacher might also notice certain shortfalls in their writing. All this information can then be used to change some of the content of the course for the following year. For the teacher this also becomes a form of formative assessment of the course, helping to guide their practice. Summative and formative assessments Students when receiving the assessment usually pay most of their attention to their scores and are almost negligent to the instructional comments given by the teacher for future improvement.(Kwok, 2008: 85)‘Summative assessments’ often take place at the end of a unit, module, or a whole course. The focus tends to be on the mark and the idea is to evaluate how well the student has learned what has been presented. Formative assessments take place during a course, module or unit. The focus is more on gathering data about the student’s progress and using this data to help them improve. We often read about these two forms of assessment as if they are clearly distinct from each other. However, it is our view that the distinction between summative and formative assessment is perhaps exaggerated, and that if greater use was made of the information from summative assessments, then in reality they too could inform. The distinction between the two types of assessment really develops out of how the information from assessments is used. Summative assessments often come at the end of the course and therefore the information gathered from them cannot always be acted upon since the teacher may not continue teaching the class. The literature often talks about product and process. When we provide formative feedback we are trying to focus more on the process and helping students to produce better drafts or recordings. Focus on the product is providing feedback on the final outcome.

What is perhaps more important, is that the formative assessments and summative assessments are well aligned and that what is summatively assessed at the end of a course or unit has been supported by the formative assessments that take place during the learning. Most teachers no longer view assessment as something that only occurs after the fact. Rather they recognize the benefits of conducting assessment before, during, and following teaching and learning. (Stoynoff, 2012: 527)

One of the biggest and most obvious changes that has happened to assessment is that there is now much more interest in the area of formative assessment. In other words, we assess students at different stages and provide feedback that they can use to improve, re-draft or change what they are currently working on, but also to help them into their future learning (often referred to as feed-forward). Key to this change is an understanding that assessment is part of the learning cycle. In other words, for students to improve, they need to take the information from assessments and use it to improve their work. This immediately makes the feedback provided from assessments a vital cog in the process. It is the feedback and information from assessments that will help students improve. This shift is not easy. Both teachers and students struggle with providing good formative feedback. Lam and Lee (2010) in their study of process writing and the benefits of formative assessments and feedback found that students still valued the mark more than the feedback they received on formative assessments, and teachers worried about the additional time and energy that would be required to provide feedback and conferencing on drafts and re-drafts. The importance of formative feedback is obvious, but the practicalities of the classroom may mean that it is not done as much as one would hope. Of course, teachers informally provide feedback all the time but providing feedback in various stages of a process can be very time-consuming.

We believe that well designed formative assessments with useful, and well thought through feedback, will greatly help both our students and our understanding of their progress. We believe that it is in this area where teachers in the classroom can have the most impact. Hence our focus in this chapter is on the use of ICT to provide formative assessments. Wash back (backwash) effect The wash back (backwash) effect is the impact that an assessment will have on the teaching and learning. This impact can be very broad. A certain assessment might impact on what a teacher teaches, what the students revise, how motivated the student feels, what skills the students focus on. If an assessment correctly reflects the skills a student needs to be a good language learner then it is likely that any work the students does in preparation for the assessment, or as part of the assessment, will have a positive impact on their learning. Prodromou (1995) highlights the limitations of the positive impact of wash back if the assessments the students are given are too narrowly defined, focus too much on accuracy and are time limited. Good assessments, that reflect good practices in language learning, are likely to have a positive wash back both from the teaching perspective (what the teachers do in preparation or as part of the assessment) and the learning perspective. Indeed, as we pointed out at the start of this chapter, good assessments will actually offer real opportunities for learning (Tomlinson, 1995).

Peer evaluation/self evaluation Davison and Leung (2009) offer a four-stage process to guide teachers in organizing classroom assessments:

1. Planning
2. Collecting information on student learning through the
3. Making judgments about
4. Providing appropriate

As views on assessment have changed this whole process has become much more inclusive (Bullock, 2011). There is considerable interest in the idea of students self-evaluating and in getting the students to build up a picture of their own learning. You hear terms like reflection, peer evaluation, self-evaluation and self-assessment. All these procedures are attempting to make students better learners, to get them to think more about their own learning, to be aware of their own shortfalls and strengths. The ultimate goal is to make the students more independent learners and hopefully more motivated too. These processes are at the heart of assessment since one of the key goals of assessment is to provide information that will help students in their learning.

Our experience from talking to teachers suggests that perhaps there is a lag between changes in teaching methodologies and the related ways to assess. So, for example, many of the teachers were using technology in their classes, working in groups and pairs and setting up collaborative activities, and yet their assessments were quite traditional. Sometimes this is because the teacher makes the changes in the classroom teaching but the assessments are set more centrally, as discussed above, and so the teacher has less influence over any changes. Another reason might be that the teacher first wants to see if the experimental ideas they attempt in class work well, and then if they do, they begin to think about how to assess them. The change in the way we teach and learn languages did not stop evolving with the development of CLT. As we mentioned at the beginning, there have been a number of emerging ideas that have impacted on our current view of teaching and learning. Indeed, a lot of teachers do not subscribe to any specific methodology or approach, but rather take an eclectic view of language learning which incorporates the best bits from a range of approaches or methodologies; we often describe the era we are in now as a post-method era (Kumarvalivedu, 1994). There has been a lot of interest in autonomous learning, in making learning more authentic and related to real situations or work-related contexts (often called task based learning) and in social interactions that aid learning (Vygotsky, 1962). The emergence of constructivism has been enthusiastically received by the CLT community since there are parallels in the two approaches. Learning a language is an active, mainly social process where a learner develops and builds his own constructs through interacting and using the language. Language is not handed down to the user from the teacher; rather it is learned and built up through the interactions with other learners (O’Dwyer, 2006).The view that classroom knowledge is socially constructed rather than being merely transmitted from teacher to student has made a significant impact in English language teaching.(Smith, 2001: 221).

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