assessing young language learners assessing young learners is not the same as assessing any other...
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ASSESSING YOUNG LANGUAGE LEARNERS
Assessing young learners is not the same as assessing any other group of learners.
WHY?
What makes the business of assessing young learners different? Age Content of Language Learning Methods of Language Learning Aims Learning Theories
AGE: children’s motor, linguistic, social and conceptual development must be taken into account in desingning and implementing assessmente
CONTENT OF LANGUAGE LEARNING: a focus on oral skills, vocabulary development and language use at discourse level.
METHODS OF TECAHING : interacive use of games, songs, rhymes, stories to cary language content and practice.
AIMS: programmes for young learners often cite social and cross- cultural aims, as well as language learnig aims.
LEARNING THEORIES: e.g. zone of proximal development; learning through social interaction, able to do more with helpful other.
WHY ASSESS YOUNG CHILDREN ?
Assessment can serve the following purposes:
To monitor and aid children’s progressTo 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?
1. Skills Development: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing
→ to examine children’s progress and/ or detect problems
2. Learning How to Learn:
Language learning skills for children:
guessing meaning from context by using language,pictures or the children’s knowledge of the world
asking for help from others
Using a dictionary
→ These help children to form useful learning habits, and to become autonomous learners.
3. Attitudes: → positive attitudes; ( The best time is childhood! ) • towards learning, and the target language and culture • conferencing ( short, private conversations with the children)
or questionnaires and observation → It is not possible to award objective marks for attitudes
BUT; • Profiles of individual children, describing their attitudes • Reports for parents, colleagues and school authorities
! You can intevene over- negative feelings.
4. Behavioral and Social Skills:→ becoming a good team memeber, being polite, being sensitive
to others’ feelings and appreciative of their efforts etc.
Principles for Assessing Children’s Language
LearningLearning-centered PerspectiveSupport Learning and Teaching
More than TestingCoherent With Learning
Children and Parents Should understand Assessment Issues
Assessment should be seen
from learning-centered perspective
Children are willing to participate in social interaction and they drive to make sense of the activities and talk they engage.A Vygotskyan perspective on learning emphasis that learning occurs in social contexts and through interaction with helpful adults or children.According to Vygotsky we do not get a true assessment of a child’s ability by measuring what she or he can do alone and without help
Assessment should
support learning and teaching
The process and outcomes of assessment can motivate learnersAn assessment activity can provide a helpful model of language useAn assessment activity, and feedback from it, can support further learningThe outcomes of assessment can help teachers plan more effective lessonsThe outcomes of assessment can inform the evaluation and improvement of courses and programs.
Assessment is more than testing
There are some alternative assessment techniques.
Why not testing?
Many of young learners limited amount of with the written languagePupils have little or no experience in assessmentStrict, exam-like conditions are not easily atteinable or desirable in the
YL classroom.(Hasselgren,2000)
Assessment should be coherent
with learningAssessment should fit comfortably with
children’s learning experience.
Assessment is an intereactional activity rather than a solo experience.
Assessment as a relation between
parents, school, teacher and the students
Children and parents should understand assessment issues.
Students: Self-assessment can be a part of learning from the beginning and can contribute to the development of self-motivated and self-directed learners at later stages.
Teachers: are restricted in the individual decisions they can take on assessment because there are national regulations that must be followed. In the case of private schools, the schools also have some their own assessment choices and teacher has to adapt and apply them.
School: school policy on assessment must take account of parents’ demands and inform & educate about the theories of learning that underpin a school’s teaching.
Parents: all around the world, they want the best for their children but generally they want the same as happened in their own schooling. So, well-informed collaborative parents are always needed.
Key Concepts in Assessment
Assessment? Testing? Evaluation?
Evaluation refers to a broader notion than assessment and refers to a process of systematically collecting information in order to make a judgement.
Assessment is concerned with pupils’ learning or performance and thus provides one type of information that might be used in evaluation
Testing is a particular form of assessment, that is concerned with measuring learning through performance
Formative and Summative Assessment
Formative assessment aims to inform on-going teaching and learning by providing immediate feedback.
Ideally, formative assessment should influence both teaching and learning by giving feedback to both teachers and learners.
Summative assessment aims to assess learning at the end of a unit, term, year or course and does not feed back into the next round of teaching.
Diagnostic and Achievement Assessment
Diagnostic assessment occurs at the beginning of the teaching/learning cycle. This type of assessment will provide the teacher with an understanding of the prior knowledge and skills a student brings to a unit, as well as the strengths and specific learning needs of an individual or groups of students in relation to the expectations that will be taught.
Achievement assessment aims to show what a learner can do.
Criterion-referenced/ Norm-referenced Assessment
Criterion-referenced assessment can match the child’s performance against an expected responseon an item or it may make use of a set of descriptors along a scale, on which a learner is placed.
Norm-referenced assessment refers to the type of assessment done when we do not compare the learner to other learners.
Validity
Validity concerns how far an assessment assesses what it claims to.
If an assessment omits some aspects of what is being assessed, its validity can also be reduced.
To make sure an assessment is as valid as possible, we need to think very carefully about what exactly we want to assess, what exactly the proposed assessment will assess and what can be claimed from the outcomes of the assessment.
Reliability
It measures how well a test or assessment assesses what it claims to. “Would the assessment produce the same results if it were taken by the same pupils on different occasions or if the same test or assessment was scored by different people?”
Reliability is increased by being very explicit about instructions to pupils and in scoring, by moderation, i.e. Having markers score the same scripts until they mark consistently in the same way.
When validity is increased, reliability decreases because the most valid assessment will be those that collect a lot of information about performance on several aspects of a skill and most reliable assessments will be those which measures only a single aspect of a skill. Therefore, the solution lies in finding a thorough balance between them.
Fairness
Fairness principles require that children are given plenty of chances to show what they can do and that their language learning is assessed through multiple methods.
Types of questions, test items or assessment tasks should also be familiar to pupils if they are to show their ability to best advantage
Planning the assessment of children’s language learning
Purposes and objectives of assessment
1.Which aspects of language learning do I want to assess?2.How does this relate to the learning experience of the children?3.What do I want to use the assessment outcome for?4.Who else will use the outcomes? And for what purposes?
Methods of Assessment
1.How will information be gathered to assess the aspects of language?
2.How will the information that is collected be interpreted?
3.How will pupils be involved in gathering the information?
Quality Management in Assessment
1.How can I make sure the assessment is valid?
2.How can I make sure the assessment is reliable?
3.How can I make sure the assessment is fair?
Feedback
1.Who will I share the assessment outcomes with?
2.How will I communicate the outcomes of an assessment?
Uses of Assessment
1.How will the outcomes of assessment inform future teaching, planning and learning opportunities?
Impact of the Assessment
1.What washback effects from assessment to teaching may occur?
2.What will be the impact be on pupils’ motivation?
Teacher Assessment of Language Learning
1. Assessing in relation to goals When goals are explicit, assessment is more
straightforward.ex: goal-- learning the names of animals strategies– understanding, production
2. Selecting an assessment focus Focus of assessment is the aspect of
language that is assessed. There may be more than one focus in the
assessment of writing, but not in the assessment of speaking
3. Assessment by observation Observation does not disturb the children
and assesses them in the process of ordinary classroom activities
Teacher focuses on the particular aspect of language that s/he focuses.
A specific and goal-directed way of looking4. Creating opportunities for
assessment in classes Who: in small classes, observation of 6-7
children in each lesson. In large classes, observation of groups
when: determined by assessment focus- Oral language, students working in pairs- Written language, talking to individual children
5. Record Keeping through checklist on which teacher simply
ticks the goals achieved by children checlists are easy to manage, but limit the
amount of information recorded about children an alternative is a loose-leaf record book with
a section for each learner
Self-Assessment Through self-assessment:
• Learners can understand more about the learning process
• Learners can be motivated towards more involvement in their learning
• Teachers can understand more about individual pupils
• Learners will be better prepared to carry on learning beyond the classroom
• A more equal relationship is created between teachers and learners
Other-regulated Self-regulated
Depending on the teacher to decide what is to be learnt
Adjusting parts of the process to suit meaning styles and preferences
•A student who learns to assess his or her own work moves from other-regulated to self-regulated
•Self-regulated(autonomous) learners at advantage in continuing to learn and adjust throughout their lives keeping pace with technology and information
•Is learner autonomy realistic in young learners?
•Should not be that unreal as very young children know how to tidy the classroom, where to keep their books and papers…etc., showing that we tend to underestimate them
• Need to set a balance between providing learner autonomy ( done in L1) and language learning
• How to develop learner autonomy concerned with increasing responsibility to the language content
• Children, aged seven and eight, can begin to understand the criteria for good performances and production
• Setting benchmarks, exemplary good pieces of work, could serve as models for their own works
PORTFOLIO
A portfolio is a collection of examples of work that, as a collection, reveal both the capability and the progress of a learner.
A language learner’s portfolio includes: samples of writing and lists of books read.
Portfolio Assessment allows for much greater child involvement in the process of recording progress and achievement.
For example Schulz (2009), talks about writing portfolios and states that:
Writing portfolio give students, teachers, and parents or caregivers an achieve of each student’s writing throughout the academic year.
European Language Portfolio
European Language Portfolio (ELP) is a companion to CEFR. ELP is the property of the learner and a tool to promote learner autonomy. It doesn’t work without frequent goal setting, monitoring, and self assessment.
Assessing Reading
Nature of Reading• Readers employ three main cueing systems
1. Graphophonic cues at the word level2. Syntactic cues at the sentence level3. Semantic cues at the whole text level
• Reading is an interactive process including both bottom-up and top-down skills
• Reading is both process and product. Process involves interaction between reader and text. Product is reading comprehension.
• As children’s schemata varies, they have different understandings from the text. Aim of reading is to come closer to the shared understandings.
• Components of reading ability (based on Banchman&Palmer’s model):
1. Organizational knowledge: grammatical knowledge, textual knowledge
2. Pragmatic knowledge: functional knowledge, sociolinguistic knowledge
• Contributing reading knowledge and skillsform an important part of reading
assessment: ability to decode knowledge of vocabulary knowledge of grammatical structures ability to predict meaning ability to draw on prior knowledge ability to understand main ideas ability to take responsibilty confidence and motivation ability to critically analyse and interpretThese skills are assessed through observation or
analysis of reading behaviour.
Issues in Assessment of Reading of Young Learners
1. Selecting reading texts & tasks for young learners
The interest level of the text Learner characteristics Authentic materials, children’s
literature Giving a response to the task Difficulty of a reading text Relation with students’ background
knowledge
2. Choosing comprehension questions Comprehension questions may be literal,
interpretative, critical or creative Text based questions about grammatical and
vocabulary knowledge3. Assessing vocabulary In informal assessment by questioning children In formal assessment through the task
Reading Assessment Strategies
1. Observation2. Interviews with parents3. Teacher-student reading conferences4. Oral reading
Children reading aloud individually or in a group
5. Informal diagnostic procedures Contain tests of contributing skills, oral
reading, silent reading, interest
6. Miscue Analysis Involves the differences between the
children’s response and actual words Analysed at graphemic, phonemic,
morphological, syntactic and semantic level
Example:Text: the man painted his house and sold itChild: the man painted his horse and sold it
7. Portfolios Help teacher gather a range of information
8.Self-assessment With self-evaluation question sheets,
progress charts, reading journals, students become responsible for their own learning
Reading Assessment Tasks1. Read-and-do tasks requiring
action responses Children follow the instructions:
read&draw, read&build, read&match
2. Reading and retelling students retell or rewrite as much as
possible of the text familiar topics are easier to recall a short time should elapse between
students’ reading and retelling/rewriting
judging retelling ways: the number of idea units, ordering or events, certain key expressions
3. Read-and-do tasks requiring a short written answer
Students respond in a few words4. Read-and-do tasks requiring a
longer written answer Students respond in longer answers The difficulty is students’ writing ability
may interfere with their chance to show their understanding
Writing a letter to a character in story, writing a summary
5. Reading&answering true or false questions
Students have a 50% chance of giving right answer
6. Reading and picture-matching Students match a word, paragraph with a
picture Characteristics of pictures should not
distract students
7. Reading & answering multiple-choice items
Teachers control students’ thought process The distractors are important
8. Reading & completing charts Ex: students read a text about animals
and complete this chart What is the
name of animal?
What does it eat?
Where does it live?
9. Cloze and gap-filling tasks Predicting meaning and filling in gaps
indicates understanding is achieved.Mrs. Lee lives in the city. She does not live in the ____1____. Every day she goes to the ____2____. She buys milk and fresh bread ____3____ for the children. She does not go ____4____ the but. She drives a car. Her ____5____ is a teacher. The school is ____6____ their house. He can walk to ____7____. The Lees have three children. Their ____8____ is seven. He likes school. He ____9____ with his father every morning. Their ____10________11____ is very small. She stays home ____12____ her mother
Assessing Speaking
Why do we need to assess speaking?
Through oral interactions young learners able to try out their hypotheses about language, receive feedback and form new hypotheses, therefore we MUST assess speaking.
•From early years in school, children encounter•Imaginative play•Action rhymes•Songs•Response to narratives•Participation in narrativesThen, they have opportunities for conversations, narratives, simple reports
•Y/N questions, questions like “What colour is your hair” limits children BUT
Questions like “What do you think about that” make learners add their personal contributions to the conversation
Points Taken Into Consideration While Assessing Speaking
•Awareness about spoken-like and written-like language continuum
•Topicalisation and Tails
•Frequency of Spoken words( Very common words in spoken language)
•Generic words( Supported by visual aids)
•Vague words( stuff, thing, thingummy, whatsit)
•Fixed phrases( That’s a good question, Let me see etc.)
•Fillers( er, uh, sort of, kind of, you know, I mean)
•Slips and errors( How much should be tolerated?)
Some Characteristics of Oral Language Ability
Organizational Knowledge
• Grammatical knowledgeChildren’s vocabulary, syntax and phonology, all of the elements needs improvement
• Textual knowledgeChildren need to speak more cohesively, master using conjunctions(and, but…etc.) and relative clauses
Pragmatic Knowledge
• Functional knowledge
Children’s ability to use different functions should increase, they need to learn how to use language to learn, imagine things and to think about things
• Sociolinguistic knowledge
Children need to learn using idioms, language according to different contexts, cultural references(e.g. See ya to friend, goodbye to teacher)
Factors needed to be taken into consideration in the
assessment of speaking
• Motivation
Speaking tasks should be meaningful for young learners and some devices needed to maintain interest:
- Puppets- Colourful pictures- A compelling one-to-one interaction
• Appropriateness of assessment tasks
More engagement likely to happen when:- More visual support available- Introductory activities before assessment tasks- Simpler language use
Assessing Pronunciation
• Words should be assessed in discourse rather than in isolation.
e.g. Please sit down /z/ sound becomes [s] in discourse
• While assessing pronunciation, the criterion should be “intelligibility”.
• Knowledge of L1 enables teachers to recognize their learners’ transfer errors from L1
Assessing Vocabulary
• Once literacy achieved, vocabulary could improve
• As students become more advanced in speaking, they need to learn more vocabulary and assessors need to assess these
• Note that vocabulary is an integral part as communicative language ability relies on increasing knowledge of vocabulary
• Some ways of assessment:- Using flashcards for comprehension check- Oral gap-filling activities while reading stories- Vocabulary games(odd-one-out…etc.)
Classroom Assessment of Oral Language
Observation• Classroom management• Classroom instructions• In group or individual reading of stories• Discussions• Class surveys… etc.
Oral records• Time-consuming
• Very valuable
• Realization that learners do not do that well but perceived so because of over-supports and non-verbal communication strategies
Teachers could observe learners in these.
Self-assessment
• Helps students to monitor their progress
i.g. Checking a list of items of what they can do(I can introduce myself…etc.)
Exemplary speaking tasks
• News telling(Children telling what they have done recently)
• Storytelling(Illustrations cut away/laminated in a book then telling the story)
• Picture talks(Describing a picture)
• Categorization tasks(Choosing from 4 pictures, which one is odd, for example)
• Oral presentations(Talking about experiences spontaneously, an assisstant needed for help)
• Question-answer tasks
Eliciting formulaic expressions in beginners
For communicative language use
- Adding element of surprise/unpredictability
- Increasing complexity of the questions
- Including new vocabulary
- Supporting language with gestures, objects, pictures
- Supporting new language by simpler or explanatory follow-up questions
• Oral interviews
A warm-up stage for student to feel comfortable
Then, a probe to see the limit of his or her ability
Again, a wind-back for student to feel comfortable in
speaking and feeling of success
Tasks related to everyday learning environment attract
learner
Using a puppet or make learner speak through a puppet
could be ice-breakers (children go quiet near strangers)
Best to follow the set questions BUT some deviation provide
probe of further abilities, then again set questions
Interviews advised to be done in a quiet environment
• Mini dialogues/role-plays
Adding unpredictability would be valuable
In slot-and-filler role plays, children asked to perform a dialogue using some of their own words
A puppet theatre would be useful
BUT role play tasks are not appropriate for beginner learners
• Oral information gap tasks
Learners need to interact and use the language to complete the task
The level of language used will depend on the proficiency and age of the children
Assesses children’s ability to give and receive instructions
Easy to produce; could be made with pics, blocks, beads…etc.
• Listening →important not just in language learning, but in learning itself.
→ Children need to be able to listen to;
♦ teacher talk ( instructions, explanations of classroom
rules and learning procedures. ♦ peer talk around activities in the classroom ♦ extended texts ( teacher input on learning topics
and stories
• Children need to be able to:
→ learn about the world→ pick up new vocabulary → connect language with what they see and do.→access new language and finding out how
langauge works.
Why is listening needed to be assessed?
• Understanding through listening → the first step towards learning.
• Assessment listening gives us the first evidence that children have started making active use of their limited knowledge of the target language.
• Listening assessment is the only way to find out what children really know during the “silent period”.
! Listening is difficult to assess because it is invisible and has to be assessed invisibly .
→ not necessarily verbal responses for the teacher to assess.
→ Therefore, the listening tasks should be desingned for children to show their understanding in non- verbal ways.
Listening comprehension → - in children’ s responses and participation in conversations - other in-class listening- only tasks which involve listening and doing- carrying out actions, answering questions, retelling, predicting and so on.
LISTENING TASKS
While selecting a listening task:• Being prepared: “Why am I listening to it?”• Product: performing an action, drawing a picture or fill in a diagram, build a model or doing a short piece of written work • Visual support: pictures, puppets, simple charts etc. the text → slightly beyond children’s current level • Authentic Material: stops and starts, interrupptions or “noise”• Not to overload children’s capacity!
Examples of Different Listening Tasks:
1. “Listen- and- do” Tasks Requiring Action Responses:
• Actions Tasks: - “Simon Says” game • Total Physical Response Tasks: * - physical response to a request or command e.g. Hilal, stand up and sit down again. Şeyda, draw a picture of a car on the blackboard , and
when you have finished, ask Hande to come and draw three
people in it. ( Mackay,….: 210)
! Remove observers who are also be asseesd if you assess each child without practice.
2. “Listen- and- do” Tasks Requiring Short Langauge
Responses• True/False Tasks: - oral: raising a different- coloured piece of paper for true or false - written: circling “true” or “false” on an answer sheet,or tick
the correct item
• Aural cloze: - listen to a text and write in the missing/ deleted words - for children with appropriate skills
! Balance the number of gaps with the time. “Story Cloze”
• Noting Specific Information: - listen for specific information and note the answer - Specific questions: “ What did the mouse do when it saw the
cat? Look at….. • Grids and Charts: * - Listen and fill in the gaps in a chart Look at …… - stimulate language use - successfully assess listening comprehension.
! Texts should be at the appropraite profiency level • Matching Tasks: * - listen to the decription of a picture and point/ circle
the picture.
• Spot the Mistake: - Listen to a familiar story with mistakes, and signal and exlain
the mistakes. e.g. a picture sequence depicting an event 3. Listening Tasks Requiring Longer Responses • Responding to a series of comprehension
questions: - listening to a text or view a video text and answer oral and
written comprehension questions - the questions → before listening to the text • Dictation: - listening to a text and writing it down as they hear it - check children’s perception and comprehension of the sounds and words
How to assess WRITING
Writing is a process and product. *pre-writing, writing, revising and editing
Children can succeed in writing in different genres at a range of different levels, and assessment is related to the gradual development of features of successful writing within each genre.
Class 4B went to the zoo.There were many different animals.Peter and I walked a long way.We saw lots of animals.I liked the tigers best
This is a successful writing because it has the basic features of recount: settings, events in time order,and concluding statement. It’s grammar is accurate and vocabulary is suitable.
Selecting writing tasks for young learners
New meanings in task rather than old meanings.Giving choicesDegree to which children’s skills in other areas (Mckay,2006)Tasks for assessing young children’s writing abilities should be based on the same principles as classroom activities.
They should represent realistic and authentic situations and generate interest and enjoyment. (Ioannou-Georgiou & Pavlou, 2003)
Different writing tasks
Writing in speech bubblesWriting in response to a pictureCompleting a storyOpen-response writingRe-forming a text
Classroom assessment of writing
ObservationWriting Conferences Students engage in their own performance, and
he/she reflects on his/her writing. (Schlz,2009)
PortfoliosSelf Assessment (Mckay, 2006)
While assessing writing creating a correction code help the learners examine their work more closely.
In terms of young learners correction code should have more pictures and cute signs.(In English, 2006)
Ex:
Effective writing assessments give teachers the opportunity to simultaneously observe, assess and instruct students
!
Assessing Integrated Skills
• Integration of skills:
→ meaningful and contextualized assessment → motivates children because : - skills complement each other and children express
more of themselves - even little knowledge can be put into real
communicative use → presents whole communication contexts to the
children
In an integrated skills assessment task,
• Children will show their competence in each individual skill by achieving a specific aim.
• Children will also show their ability to use al the
skills to achieve the overall aim of the activity
Use of Assessment Information
Outcomes of assessment and uses
• Summative assessment types (tests, etc) can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a course, programme,etc
• Formative assessment types (observations, portfolios,etc) can be converted into feedback and influences how the next lesson is planned by the teacher
FEEDBACK
Feedback is information the children take and give about their performances
It is a vital part of assessment process Why is feedback so important?
children discover their weaknesses and strenghts they become more motivated they persist in their learning
how and when to give feedback?
it should be given as soon as possible after assessment task
it can be given to each child individually, groups of children or to the whole class
it can be in the form of self-correction or peer feedback
it should focus on tasks, process of task, activities, not on personality
it should be based on actual student performance
it should provide suggestions for improvement
it can be given orally or in a written way- verbal feedback gives more information
and is more interactive.- written feedback gives teacher more time
to think about student performance and is more permenant for students.
feedback can be implicit or explicit- explicit: grammatical explanation, overt
error correction- implicit: confirmation checks, repetition,
recast, silence - implicit feedback is not appropriate for
young learners.
Children understand the target performance
They compare target and current performance
They close the gap between target and current performance
it should be clear, detailed, related to the specific learning process and related to target performance
ways for teacher intervention:1. Corrective feedback:- helps students correct their language use- is primarily concerned with accuracy- does not necessarily point out to errors,
but repeats student’s words with the correct form
ex: pupil: I come to school yesterday teacher: I came to school yesterday pupil: I came to school yesterday teacher: Well done!
2.Evaluative feedback
- is in the form of a judgement on students’ performance
ex: 1. That one was quite easy. Ouite a few one got that one right. Now the next one was very hard. You had to think.
2. That was very good. I liked the way you said the sentences clearly.
3. Strategic feedback- offers advice on what to do to improve performanceex: look at my tongue- put your tongue on your teeth-
the