Language Assessment In Teaching

Teaching is a systematic process which involves an aim or a purpose for doing the act of teaching, a method or means by which it can be achieved, the material that can support the learning methodology, a monitoring system and an effective assessment process to conclude that the desired outcome has been reached. It is more so with communicative language teaching too which aims at the target language proficiency of the learners. Language proficiency is defined as the ability to function adequately in face-to-face situation and use English appropriately in a conversational context. Cummins (1982,1984) added another dimension to this context embedded face-to-face interaction by adding context reduced academic communications. Any proficiency assessment

Authentic activities refer to those which call for purposeful exchanges of information not those that provide information already known to the listener or speaker. (Brown and Yule 1983) Any assessment, either formal or informal that evaluates or tests or assesses (these terms have been used interchangeably, see Palmer, Nunan, D. and O’Malley) a student’s oral or written response to a test construct is called performance assessment. When it is formal, the second language pedagogy calls it testing and when informal as assessment. The informal assessment is integrated into the day to day learning program; testing is a periodical assessment usually on the completion of units of syllabus, to give marks and on completion of syllabus it is called examination and gives grades and degrees to students. But one needs to accept students do not take assessments as seriously as they take the tests and

It is a social activity in which participants act out specified roles, in a social setting that is identifiable in everyday life. The simulated context and characters may require the students to create dialogues appropriate for the same and their delivery may be spontaneous if unscripted or may involve memorizing, if scripted. However it is also true that role plays are not cognitively demanding. They tend to be more structured than improvisations but less scripted than simulation plays. These activities are authentic because they involve language use in interactive contexts. These interactive contexts throw ample scope for individual, pair and group assessment cutting short the time requirement considerably. Their format being that of real life conversations, associated conversational features such as repetitions, interruptions, hesitations, distractions, changes of topics, facial expressions, gestures naturally get integrated into the performance and are automatically assessed as sub-skills. Role plays assimilate peer scaffolding (Vygotsky 1978) which is derived from cognitive psychology and research in L1 (Donato, 1994), and it refers to the supportive conditions made by a knowledgeable participant in a social interaction. The pair and group work bring in prompts by peers when the other participant is stammering on account of lack of vocabulary or syntax; and writing down the script and