What should we expect from our students writing outcomes?

Brown (2000) asserts that literate people in developed countries learn the rudiments of writing in their native language, but ‘very few learn to express themselves clearly with logical, well-developed organization that accomplishes an intended purpose. And yet we expect second language learners to write coherent essays with artfully chosen rhetorical and discourse devices!’(p.218).  

The writing skill then is clearly very hard to improve in every case. The questions for us as English teachers are: what should we expect from our students writing? How can we successfully assess their performance? I certainly do not have the answer, but I am going to share what I believe we should take into account in order to avoid big mistakes.

From my experience as an English teacher I have to say that for teaching and assessing writing, as well as for the other language skills, we go to classrooms without solid bases. Because of this, we make a lot of mistakes such as: not setting objectives for the tasks we want our students to perform, not having clear what we want to assess, not considering our students needs, and more importantly, we tend to forget that English is not our students’ mother tongue and that the input they are exposed to is little. As a result of this, our assessment on students writing ability is poor.

In my personal case, I used to be very strict with my students writing; for instance, if a student did not write an accurate sentence that followed all grammar rules, I did not give any recognition to his/her job. To make matters worse, instead of giving my students’ accurate performance a thumbs up, I used to punish their mistakes. In other words, my grading rubric basically consisted of discounting one or two points for each mistake. Consider the following example:

1.       Write about your vacations.

       I go to Cartagena last month.

           ( -2  )   

For this reason, a lot of my students used to get low grades in writing, which truly did not reflect their real performance.

As teachers, we need to understand the process that our students go through in order to improve their writing ability. Furthermore, we need to be there to help them and to guide them in their process. To do this, what I now consider is the best way is not to punish their mistakes, but to encourage their practice.

Now, I would like to leave some questions for you:

What mistakes do you think you made when assessing writing?

How would you change your writing assessment procedures?

Assessing Speaking

    Keeping the reflection mode on, I would like to share some aspects of my personal English learning experience concerning the assessment of speaking. Going back to school time, I remember that my first English classes were based on memorizing vocabulary and drilling. By that time, the only way of speaking assessment I can think of consisted on repeating a set of vocabulary over and over again. Because of this, I consider that the only kind of speaking assessment that took place was imitative.

    Moving to high school time, I would divide my learning experience in two: the first four years and the last two. In the first period of time, I remember my English classes being more based on grammatical structures than isolated vocabulary. During that time, it was common for us to see titles such as: The Verb TO BE, Present Simple, and Past Simple on the board. In fact, our teacher used to teach to us some formulas for getting the right structures. For example:  

The Present Simple

Negative form:   S + AUX (DO / DOES) + NOT + V + C

    Our speaking assessment by then was very rare. We were mostly asked to write a lot of sentences in whatever grammatical structure we were studying. The only speaking practice that I can think of is that every year we had to memorize an English song and sing it to the teacher.

    Finally in the last two years, things changed and more importance was given to speaking practice. Our learning was still mostly grammar focused; however, activities such as: songs, acting out conversations and retelling stories were also included in our English class. As a project for English class, learning an English song was included in our curriculum. For this activity, I would say that the kind of assessment that took place was intensive. On the other hand, acting out conversations was interactive assessment. Finally, when retelling stories extensive assessment took place.

    To sum up, I would like to say that the study of speaking assessment has been very useful not only to identify the types of assessment I was exposed to in my school years, but also to learn from what I was taught in the past and analyze how those assessment tools influenced my learning process. In that way, I feel more capable of analyzing and taking into account the wide variety of assessment practices that I can use in my professional life. 

Based on this reflection, I would like to state some questions for you:
In what ways were you assessed in speaking?

How effective do you think they were?

Do you assess your students the same way you were? What kinds of speaking assessment do you currently use in your teaching practice?

Which way of speaking assessment do you find more comfortable to be assessed? Why?

A Reflection

At this point, I would like us to share the impact that our study of assessment as made on us so far. To do so, I would like to state the following questions:

- Has your conception of teaching and learning changed? How?

- Have you been reflecting on your teaching practices lately?

- Have you consider making some changes? Which ones?

- What strategies are you planning to use to make those changes happen?

As it has been previously said, teaching is all about making decisions and I would like to share a decision that I have made lately. I decided to carefully reflect on my role as a teacher and to try to analyze how successful or not I have been and why. 

Thinking about our discussion of the principles of language assessment, I realized that I had little knowledge about designing successful tools of assessment. I discovered that I was making huge mistakes when designing formal tests for my students. Firstly, I used to design the tests in either two ways; on the one hand, I used to give my students the suggested test provided by the textbook. On the other hand, I used to look for exercises on the topics and organize them to fit the test design. Those two decisions were mistaken because they were based only on my conception that the tests were appropriate for my students. Among other things that I should have thought of; I never thought about how my students were going to feel like when they were exposed to the test; I did not ask myself if they were familiar enough with the kind of exercise they were asked to perform or if they were familiar with the instructions that were given. 

Another mistake was that although from the beginning of the cycle/course I knew when the tests were supossed to be administered and the topics that each of those had to cover, I used to wait until days before the due date for the draft of the test to be given to actually design the test. By that time, I used to think that it was not ok to design the test in the last minute. However, I never thought about how those decisions were affecting my students learning process. Now, I realize that if I had thought of the test in accordance with the lessons, I would have helped my students to have much better outcomes. For example, if I had exposed my students to the same kind of exercises that I presented in the test, they would have been more successful because they were already familiar with those type of exercises. I used to desperately wonder: Why are they underlying when I am asking them to circle? And I used to tell myself: It is because they are not taking time to read the instructions. Now, I know that it was my responsability to first make my students familiar with the exercises before using them in the test. At that time, I had no idea about key concepts of students' assessment such as: washback, validity, authenticity, among others. I can say then that the lack of knowledge and reflection on my teaching practice affected negatively my students learning process.

As a general conclusion, I would say that although we all have made different kinds of mistakes in our teaching practice, the most important thing is that we learn from those mistakes and that we try as hard as we can to avoid them in the future. I would finally say that we should think of our mistakes as the basis in the construction of the successful teachers we want to be. 

Assesment, Evalutation, Testing and Grading

According to what Craig (2012) argues in the discussion of assessment versus evaluation:"in terms of what, it is often said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction"(p.3). It can be said that assessment is the way in which teachers, curriculum designers and administrators can know students success on grasping the concepts that they are exposed to. To do so, teachers use tests (among other tools)in order to know to what extend students are sucessful or not. By grading, teachers provide a feedback that can be a number, a letter, etc that represents students'performance.

On the other hand, evaluation is how the success of teachers as instructors is analyzed. In this case, their ways to teach, to introduce a topic, and to explain (among others) are subject to study.