10/ Assessment

Assessment
Teachers should observe the pupils progress during each class
period. The teacher may write brief notes about every pupil after every
class period. When classes are large, it is possible that not all pupils will
participate orally in every class period. However, teachers can observe
pupils body language and facial expressions to be sure that if they
understand the lesson. Besides, teachers can use revision units as part of
the pupils assessment. Teachers should tolerate errors and correct the
major ones only.
Evaluation and testing are carried out by designing oral and written
tests. Such tests should how far we reached our objectives
(comprehension, speaking and writing). Oral tests should measure oral
comprehension and speech fluency whereas written tests should measure
efficiency in written comprehension (reading and writing). These tests
have to rely on qualitative and quantitative modes of assessment.
The next step is to decide how we are going to test. We could
employ some integrative tasks, especially for productive skills like
speaking and writing. For the receptive skills and for testing language, we
could use some discrete item tasks. The following are some of these
formats:
a. Reading and Listening: (table-completion, short answer
questions, listing, MCQs, true/false, diagrams, maps, pictures,
etc.).
b. Writing: (guided writing, summary, punctuation, dictation, etc.).
c. Speaking: (free interviews, picture description, role-play, oral
presentation, etc.).
d. Language: (gap-fill, cloze blank, translation, table-completion,
sentence transformation, etc.).