Resume Chapter 1, 6,7,9 and concepts

CHAPTER 1

TESTING, ASSESSING, AND TEACHING

• Tests can be a positive experience, they can build a person´s confidence and become learning experiences. They can bring out the best in students.

WHAT IS A TEST?
• A test is a method of measuring a person´s ability, knowledge or performance in a given domain.
Method: it is an instrument that requires performance on the test-taker.
It Measures general abilities as well as specific knowledge of the test-taker.
It measures a given domain.

ASSESSMENT AND TEACHING



• Teachers TEACH a certain aspect of a given domain of English Language (for instance). During this time the teacher gives the students opportunity of practicing, listen, take risks, set goals and process feedback. Within this process the teacher is constantly, formally and informally ASSESSING his and her students, sometimes even in an unconscious way. Whenever a student responds to a question or offers a comment or uses a new word, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the pupil´s performance. This can be done during clases or outside of the classroom, whenever the teacher and student interact.
• And finally, in order for teachers to measure his or her student´s development on language learning, they give TESTS to the students, which are a subset of assessment.

Informal Assessments: incidental, unplanned comment and responses along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student (e.g. marginal comments on papers).
Formal Assessments : systematic, planned sampling techniques constructed to give teacher and student an apraisal of student achievement (e.g. tests).

Formative Assessment: evaluating students in the process of forming their competences and skills with the goal of helping them continue that growth process.
Summative Assessment: occurs at the end of a course or unit of a course or unit of instruction. It aims to measure, or summarize, what a student has grasped.

Norm-Referenced Tests: place the test-taker along a mathematical continuum in rank order. They have predetermined responses. Their primary concern are money and eficiency.
Criterion-Referenced Tests: are designed to give test-takers feedback, usually in the form of grades. They intend to deliver the test-taker useful, appropiate feedback. Those tests which involve the students in only one class, connected to a curriculum, are typical of criterion-referenced testing.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TESTING: A BRIEF HISTORY
• 1950´s contrast between two languages
• 1960´s and 1980´s communicative theories of language
• Nowadays the quest is for more authentic, valid instruments that simulate real world interaction.
Discrete-Point Testing: are constructed on the assumption that language can be broken down into its component parts (listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and various units of language of phonology, morphology, lexicon, etc.)
Integrative Testing: communicative competence is so global that requires such integration. Two types of tests: CLOZE tests (reading passage, every 6th or 7th word deleted. They measure overall proficiency) and DICTATIONS (learners listen to a passage of 100 or 150 words, and write what they hear, using correct spelling.) These tests give information about the candidate´s linguistic competence.
Communicative Language Testing
• By the mid 80´s a need for correspondance between language test performance and language use appeared: Quest for Authenticity. It also appeared the importance of strategic competence (the ability to employ communicative strategies to compensate for breakdowns as well as to enhance the retorical effect of utterances)

• Performance-Based Assessment of language tipically involves oral production, written production, open-ended responses, integrated performance, group performance, and other interactive tasks. Eventhough such assessment is time-consuming and therefore expensive, higher content validity is achieved because learners are measured in the process of performing the targeted linguistic acts. Many (but not all)of these assessments include interactive tasks. Students are measured in the act of speaking, requesting, responding, or in combining listening and speaking, and in integrating reading and writing. If care is taken, tasks can approach the authenticity of real-life language use.

CURRENT ISSUES IN CLASSROOM TESTING
• Three issues:
1.- New Views on Intelligence
2.- Traditional and "Alternative" Assessment
3.- Computer-Based Testing

1.- New Views on Intelligence
• Gardner (1983, 1999): 7 components of intelligence (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spacial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal)
• Sternberg (1988, 1997): creative thinking and manipulative strategies = part of intelligence. Smartness is found in those who are able to manipulate other people.
• Goleman (1995): "EQ" Emotional Quocient. Those who manage their emotions tend to be more capable of fully intelligent processing.
Sense of both freedom and responsibility for tests designers.

2.- Traditional and "Alternative" Assessment
• The following concepts represent some overgeneralizations and should be considered with caution.
• considerably more time and higher budgets are required for more subjective evaluation, more individualization, and more interaction in the process of offering feedback.


Traditional Assessment Alternative Assessment
One-shot, standardized exams Continuous, long term assessment
Timed, multiple-choice format Untimed, free-response format
Decontextualizaed test items Contextualized communicative tasks
Scores suffice for feedback Individualized feedback and washback
Norm-referenced scores Criterion-referenced scores
Focus on the "right" answer Open-ended, creative answers
Summative Formative
Oriented to product Oriented to process
Non-interactive performance Interactive performance
Fosters extrinsic motivation Fosters intrinsic motivation

3.- Computer-Based Testing
• Students receive prompts in the form of spoken or written stimuli from the computerized test and are required to type or speak their responses.
• One of these tests is the computer-adaptive test (CAT), in which the computer is programmed to continuously adjust to find questions of appropriate level for the test-taker.

ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
• Classroom-based testing. • Lack of security and the possibility of cheating in unsupervised computerized tests.
• Self directed testing on various aspects of a language (one or all of the skills, vocabulary, grammar, etc.) • Unofficial websites may be mistaken for validated assessments.
• practice for upcoming high-stakes standardized tests. • The multiple choice format contains the usual potencial for flawed item design.
• Some individualization, in the case of CATs. • Open-ended responses are less likely to appear, because of the need for human scorers.
• They can be administered to thousands of students, at many different stations, and scored electronically for rapid reporting results. • The human interactive element is absent (especially in oral production).











CHAPTER 6 Concepts Assessing Listening

Listening: It is one of the Receptive skills where the listener should attend fully and be active in constructing the meaning of what they hear. It helps if they have a particular purpose in listening.

Observation: Been able to see or hear the performance of the learner.

Triangulation: Consider at least two or more performances or context
before drawing a conclusion, because we have to consider
the fallibility of the results of a single performance.

Intensive Listening: It includes just the perception of the components of a larger stretch of languages such as phonemes, words,intonation, discourse markers, etc.

Responsive Listening: It is short piece of spoken language in order to
make an equally short response, for instance: a greeting, question, command, comprehension check,etc.

Selective Listening: It has to do with processing stretches of discourse for several minutes in order to scan certain information.(short monologues)
You have to able to comprehend designated information of longer stretches.

Extensive Listening: Listening massive amounts of texts, it needs a global understanding, it is more general and it includes making inferences as well.

Interactive skills: Ensure and help you to understand the messages of the spoken language, some of them are note-taking questioning and discussion.


Microskills: Attends to the smaller bits and chunks of language in more of a bottom-up process.

Macroskills: Focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to listening task.

Clustering:How you divide the pieces of spoken language in order to focus students's atention just in chunks,phrases,clauses,etc.

Redundancy: Recognizing the repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations and insertions in the spoken language.


Performance Variables: Being able to remove or recognize hesitations, false starts, pauses and corrections in natural speech.

Rate of Delivery: Follow the same speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues.

Paraphrase Recognition: You have to identify the same message that you listened but with different words related to several alternatives.

Listening Cloze: The test-taker listens to a piece of spoken language and simultaneously read the written text in which some words have been deleted.

Information Transfer: Students have to choose the correct picture according to what they hear. They have to transfer the information to a visual representation.

Map-marking: It is a type of task in which test-takers must process around 250 words of colloquial language in order to complete the tasks of identifying names, positions, and directions in a car accident scenario on a city street.

Sentence repetition: The test-taker must retain a stretch of language and then reproduced it, responding with an oral repetition.

PhonePass: It's a test that relies largely on sentence repetition to assess both oral production and listening comprehension.

Dictation: Test-taker hears a passage, typically of 50 to 100 words recited three times.

Burst: It's the length of the word group.

Communicative Stimulus-response: A genre of assessment task in which the test-taker is presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation and then is asked to answer a set of comprehension questions.

Field-independent skills: the ability to remember certain details from a conversation.

Inference: A process needed to respond during a listening comprehension task.

Note-taking:Students listening a piece of spoken language and then they have to fill the missing information,but before that they need to infer the answer.

Editing: It's an authentic task provides both a written and spoken stimulus, and requires the test-taker to listen for discrepancies.

Interpretive task: The objective of this task is extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test-taker to infer a response.

Retelling: After test-taker listen to a story, news and retell it. Test–taker must identify the gist, main idea, purpose, supporting points and/or conclusion to show full comprehension.


Assessing Listening Chapter 6


listening is one of the receptive skills
Listening is often implied as a component of speaking.How could you speak a language without also listening? In addition the overly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable than listeningWe need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroomListening is acquired by knowing and doing and is evidenced by appropriate feedback or response.
Basic types of listening
Stages like recognizing speech sounds, determine the type of speech event, decodingand retaining relevant information represents a potential assessment objective:
1.-comprehending of surface structure elements (phonemes,words,etc.)
2.-undertanding of pragmatic context
3.-determinining meaning of auditory input
4.-developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding
These stages allow us to derive four commonly identified types of listening performances
Intensive: perception of the components of a larger stretch of languages, (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.)

Responsive: a short stretch of language in order to obtain a short response, (a greeting, question, command, comprehension check,etc)

Selective: listening for a purpose in order to get certain information

Extensive: a global understanding ,the main idea of .
Micro and macro skills of listening
Microskills: aim to the smaller bits and chunks of language in more of a bottom-up process.
Examples: _ discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English
_ retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory
_ recognize English stress patterns,words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure ,intonation and their role in signaling information
Macroskills: aim on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to listening task.
Examples: _ recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations,participants,goals
_ from events, ideas predict outcomes, infer links and connections,deduce causes and effects,detect the main idea…etc.
What makes listening difficult?
There are many aspects that make listening difficult.developing a sense of which aspects are predictably difficult will help you to assign or challenge your students appropriately,consider the following list of what make listening difficult:
Clustering: attending to appropriate chunks of languages phrases, clauses, constituents
Redundancy: to recognize the kinds of repetitions rephrasing elaborations and insertions that spoken language often contain
Reduce forms: understanding the reduce forms that haven’t been presented in formal learners textbooks
Performance variable: being able to remove hesitations,pauses,false starts and correction in natural speech
Colloquial language: comprehending idioms,slangs,reduced forms ,share cultural knowledge
Rate of delivery: processing automatically as the speaker continues
Stress rhythm and intonation: correctly understanding prosodic elements of spoken language
Interaction: managing of the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening etc.
CHAPTER 7
ASSESSING SPEAKING
What is speaking?
It is one of the productive skills. Listening and speaking are almost closely interrelated. It is difficult to isolate oral production tasks that do not directly involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Most of speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic strings.
The speaker makes choices:
Lexicon
Structure
Discourse
Scoring speaking: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar comprehensibility etc.

Types of speaking:
1.-Imitative: the ability to simply parrot back (imitative) phonetic level of oral production, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical properties of languages. Interested only in pronunciation
2. - Intensive: the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical phrasal, lexical or phonological relationship intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture.
3. - Responsive: interaction and test comprehension of short conversations. Simple request and comments.
4. - Interactive: it has the purpose of exchanging specific information or interpersonal exchanges.
5. - Extensive: (monologue) includes oral presentations and story telling. Language style is frequently more deliberative and formal for extensive tasks.

Micro and Macro Skills
The micro skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.
The macro skills imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.

THERE ARE 3 IMPORTANTS ISSUES FOR DESIGNING TASKS:
1. - Involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possibly reading
2.- Your elicitation should prompt achieves its aims as closely as possible
3.- specify scoring procedures for a response

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: IMITATIVE SPEAKING
Audio-lingual method: repeating of words, phrases, and sentences
Communicative language teaching: overemphasis on fluency can sometimes lead to the decline of accuracy in speech. Help learners be more comprehensible.
Word repetition task: a variation on such a task prompts test takers have to read aloud. scoring specifications must be clear in order to avoid reliability breakdowns.
Scoring scale for repetition tasks: acceptable pronunciation comprehensible, partially correct pronunciation silence, seriously incorrect pronunciation

Phonepass Test
Phonepass production tasks, a widely used among a number of speaking tasks on the test, repetition of sentences. The phonepass test elicits computer-assisted oral production over a telephone. Test-taker read aloud, repeat sentences, says words, and answer questions. Scores for the phonepass test are calculated by a computerized scoring template and reported back to the test-taker. Reading fluency, repeat accuracy, repeat fluency, and listening vocabulary. Scoring using speech-recognition technology becomes achievable and practical.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTENSIVE SPEAKING
Short stretches of discourse: No more than a sentence
Cued tasks: Narrow band of possibilities.
Limited response and mechanical tasks: Controlled responses.
Directed Response Tasks: is elicited a grammatical form or a transformation of the sentence. This required minimal processing of meaning, in order to produce a good grammatical output.
Read-Aloud Tasks: technique by selecting a passage that incorporates test specs. The scoring is easy because all of the test-taker’s oral production is controlled.
Sentence /Dialogue completion Tasks and Oral Questionnaires: To read a dialogue in which one speaker’s lines have been omitted. Test-takers have to give time to read the dialogue and to think about appropriate lines to fill in.
Picture-cued Tasks: Requires a description from the test-taker.
Translation: is a meaningful communicative device in contexts where English is not the native or prevailing language.

DESIGNNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: RESPONSIVE SPEAKING

Responsive Speaking: assessment of responsive tasks involves brief interactions with an interlocutor, differing from intensive tasks in the increased creativity given to the test-taker and from interactive tasks by the somewhat limited length of utterances.

Questions and Answers: in its purpose a question can vary from intensive to responsive type.
Display questions (intensive): intends to elicit a predetermined correct response.
Referential questions (responsive): the test taker is given more opportunity to produce meaningful language in response.

Giving Instructions and directions: this provides an opportunity for the test-taker to engage in a relatively extended stretched of discourse, to be very clear and specific, and to use appropriate discourse markers and connectors. The technique is simple: the administrator poses the problem, and the test-taker responds. Scoring is based primarily on comprehensibility and secondarily on other specified grammatical or discourse categories.

Paraphrasing: this task consists on asking the test-taker to read or hear a limited number of sentences and produce a paraphrase of the sentence.

Test of Spoken English (TSE): a 20-minute audiotaped test of oral language ability within an academic or professional environment. The tasks on the TSE are designed to elicit oral production in various discourse categories rather than in selected phonological, grammatical, or lexical targets.

ORAL PRODUCTION:
1. - Interactive Speaking: a) Interviews
b) Role play
c) Discussions
d) Games

2. - Extensive Speaking: Speeches
Telling longer stories
Explanations
Translations

INTERACTIVE SPEAKING

Defined as Interpersonal, interactive are tasks that involve relatively long stretches of interactive discourse.

a) Interview: a test administrator and a test-taker sit down in a direct face to face exchange and proceed through a protocol of questions and directives.
Test taker will have to perform 4 stages:
1. - Warm up: The interviewer directs mutual introductions and makes the situation comfortable. There is no scoring of this phase. E.g.: Small talk: How are you?
What is your name?.
2. - Level check: The interviewer simulates the test-taker to respond using expected or predicted forms and functions. Linguistic target criteria are scored in this phase.
3. - Probe: Probe questions and prompt challenge to go to the heights of their ability, to extend beyond the limits of the interviewer’s expectation through increasingly difficult questions. They can be complex, they may be scored or ignored if the test-taker. E.g.: If you were president of your country. What would you like to change about your country?
4. - Wind down: a short period of time which the interviewer encourages the test-taker to relax with simply questions, and provides information about when and where to obtain the results. It is not scored. E.g.: Do you have any questions to ask me?

b) Role Play: A pedagogical technique in communicative language-teaching classes. It frees students to be somewhat creative in their linguistic output. E.g. “Pretend you are a tourist asking me for directions”. Role play can be controlled or guided by the interviewer; the test administrator must determine the assessment objectives of the role play.

c) Discussions and Conversations: As informal techniques to assess learners, they offer a level of authenticity and spontaneity that other assessment techniques may not provide.
It’s difficult for formal assessments. It’s good to observe such abilities as: negotiated meaning, topic meaning. Etc.

d) Games: In informal assessments, games involve language production. There are four types: Tinkertoy games (Lego block), Crossword puzzles, Information gaps and City maps.

ORAL PROFICIENCY INTERVIEW (OPI)
The OPI is an oral interview under the control of an interviewer. This is the result of a historical progression of revisions under the auspices of several agencies, including the Educational Testing Service and the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL). OPI is used is many languages around the world. OPI is designed to elicit pronunciation, fluency and integrative ability, sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, grammar and vocabulary. In speaking there are four levels: = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Superior, Advanced, Intermediate and Novice. Mandates certified examiners, who pay a fee to achieve examiner status.








CHAPTER 9 WRITING
What is writing?
first of all Writing is skill or ability use to render language into the written words. Also writing is one of the four abilities of English and Writing is one of the 2 receptive skills.

Genres of writing

1. Academic writing: eg. Essays, compositions, journals, reports, thesis, dissertation.
2. Job-related writing: eg. Letters, mails, phone message, manuals.
3. Personal writing: e.g. Notes, calendar entries, diaries, poetry, personal journal.

Types of writing performance

There four categories the writing performance

1. Imitative: the ability to spell correctly
2. Intensive: skill in producing appropriate vocabulary within context, collocations.
3. Responsive: performance a limited discourse level connecting sentences into a paragraph and creating a logically sequence of two or three paragraph
4. Extensive: processes and strategies of writing for all purpose (essay, theses, etc) focus on achieving a purpose and developing ideas logically

Types of writing are stages of the development of writing ability. It is divided in two:

Micro and macroskill of writing.

Micro skill: apply more appropriately to imitative and intensive type of writing task.

Macro skill: Are essential for the successful mastery of responsive and intensive writing.

Designing assessment tasks: the rudiments of forming letters, words and simple sentences

Tasks in writing letters, words and punctuation: a limited variety of types of tasks commonly used to assess a person's ability to produce written letters and symbols.
- Copying
- Listening cloze selection tasks
- Picture cued tasks
- Converting numbers and abbreviation to words


Form Completion Tasks: a variation on pictures is the use of a simple form that asks for name, address, phone number, ect.

Converting numbers and abbreviations to words: there is some tests have a section on which numbers are written.

Spelling test: dictates a simple list of words, one word at a time.

Matching phonetic symbols: recognize the phonetic alphabet or use it. Help to perceive the relationship between phonemes and graphemes.

Designing assessment tasks:

Intensive writing: controlled writing

-Pictures cued tasks
-form completion task
-Converting numbers and abbreviation to words

Vocabulary assessment tasks:

-Multiple choice recognition
-guessing the meaning of a word in context etc.

Issues in assessing responsive and extensive

-Authenticity: face and content validity need to be assured in order to being out the best in the writer.

-Scoring: Is the thorniest issue at these final two stages of writing with so many options available to a learner.

-Time: it is the only skill in which the language producer is not necessarily constrained by time which implies the freedom to proceeds multiple drafts before the text becomes a finished p product.

Dicto-comp: it is a technique, which a handout with key word from the paragraph, in sequence, as cues for the students

Grammatical transformation tasks: Of a structural paradigm of language teaching with start-feller techniques and slat substitution skill. To measure grammatical competence.
Vocabulary assessment tasks: techniques use to asses vocabulary; these are defining and using words in a sentence.

Timed impromptu: format is a valid method of assessing writing ability.
Designing assessment tasks: response and extensive writing

Paraphrasing: is to ensure that learners understand the importance of paraphrasing, to say something in one's words, to avoid plagiarizing, to offer some variety in expression

Guided question and answer: formation which the test administrator poses a series of question that essentially serve as an outline of the emergent written text.

Paragraph construction tasks

- Topic sentence writing
- Topic development within paragraph
- Development of main and supporting ideas across paragraph

TWE: test of written English.