The Enigmatic Reading Process

Reflecting on Brown’s suggestions I’ve come to realize that in most of the cases I’ve given my students poorly designed, multiple-choice, non-illustrated reading tests expecting them to answer the questions correctly.

I have to admit that I don’t usually ask myself if their answers in the tests are carefully thought or just guessed. In my defense I have to say that it is not because I don’t care about their learning process, but because I tend to forget that reading is a very complex skill and that its tasks need to be very well designed, applied and assessed.    

In order to explain the complexity of the reading process I will compare it with doing magic. One may think that reading is as easy as putting words into sentences, throwing them into a magic box and then with the help of the magic powder...voilà!, in the blink of an eye you have the outcome you are expecting, which in this case is not the cute bunny but the specific reading performance that you want to assess.

You may say, come on!, That is not new, everybody knows there are always secrets behind magic. Well, the same happens with reading, there are so many things happening into our students’ brain, but we only get to see the outcome.

The trick's success depends on how well that “mysterious” process is made. In our particular case, our reading comprehension depends on how well we use our linguistic knowledge which involves morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic knowledge.

Our role as teachers shouldn’t be limited to just being spectators who only watch for the outcome (answers to test questions), we should care about what happens behind the visible. In order to do this we have to teach our students strategies so that they can improve their reading comprehension, and during reading tasks we should provide them with the necessary input for them to activate all their knowledge and fuel their brain’s engine so it starts working.

Just like in any other skill, practice makes perfect, so I invite you to spend more time doing meaningful reading tasks during your English classes. 

Should we ask “do you speak English?” or “do you understand and speak English?”

Human communication takes place when there is an exchange of thoughts, messages, or information between two people: a sender and a receiver. Such exchange occurs between the participants (with or without the receiver being present of aware of the senders intent to communicate) by means of speech, visuals, signals, writing, or behavior.

When we communicate orally, our listening, and speaking skills are essential. In the language teaching field these two aspects of the language are also interrelated. However, when it comes to assessment, Brown (2000) suggested that “listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking” as can be seen in the emphasis that exists on speaking rather than on listening in the standardized testing industry. 

Brown’s comments on this matter made me think of the many occasions in which I have unconsciously supported what he calls a “universal bias toward speaking”. I have to admit that I have sometimes underestimated the importance of designing listening assessment tasks that will give my students the positive washback they need.

Assessing listening should be more than a way of telling if students have heard correctly or not. Listening goes beyond recognizing speech sounds and therefore, its assessment tasks should be designed according to the different types of performance that we want students to achieve such as the intensive, responsive, selective and extensive listening performance.

        To conclude I would like to invite you to consider Brown’s words the next time you plan your lessons and assess your students. By doing so, I hope your students receive the proper input, practice and assessment to improve not only their listening performance but all the other aspects of the language learning process.

        Good listening comprehension abilities are prerequisites for good oral production, so the next time you ask people about their proficiency in English don’t forget that what you really want to know is if they can UNDERSTAND as well as speak English. 

Introduction to Evaluation

Classroom-based Evaluation in Second Language Education

Second language evaluation involves taking many kinds of decisions. Decisions about many different aspects of teaching and learning such as the placement of students in a particular level, the units of instruction, the instructional objectives and plans, the homework, the materials used in class, etc.

In many of the cases teachers are in charge of making the decisions; sometimes they collect the information for others to make the decisions; or sometimes they help others make the decision by offering interpretations of students' performance. However, teachers are not the only participants in evaluation; parents, other teachers, non-instructional educational professionals (counselors and remedial specialists), and students also play an important role in the evaluation process.

Second language evaluation relies on many different kinds of information about students achievement, their behavior in class, their attitude towards school or themselves, their goals and needs, and their work habits, learning styles and strategies, etc. These types of information can be gathered through tests, observation of the students behavior, students comments during individual conferences, or through entries in students' journals.

Before making any decision it is necessary to identify the purpose or purposes for collecting evaluative information. Depending on the nature of the purpose there is specific information needed and a particular method of data collection. Once the information has been collected, it has to be interpreted in order for it to be meaningful so that it can be analyzed to make the final decisions. To sum up it can be said that classroom-based evaluation has three essential components: information, interpretation, and decision making.

A Summary of Assesment, Evaluation, Testing and Grading pp. 1-10. Scanlan, (2012).

What is Assessment?

Many educators have a very limited conception of assessment that only includes the concepts of testing and grading. They ignore that assessing goes beyond assigning students a grade and that it is crucial in the teaching/learning process.

Assessment implies making a judgment or measurement of worth of something. In the academic context it is known as educational assessment and it involves gathering and evaluating data on the different learning activities or programs.

Learner assessment is one particular type of educational assessment. It is normally conducted by teachers and it is designed for motivating and directing learning and providing feedback on the educational process or product. Feedback is provided to the key participants of the educational process:  students (feedback on learning), teachers (feedback on instruction), curriculum designers (feedback on curriculum), and administrators (on use of resources).   

Why Assessment is Important

The importance of assessment relies on the potential that it has for directing students learning as well as teachers decision-making. Students learning can be directed in the sense that educators can use students’ interest in passing tests as a way to manipulate the kind of learning that takes place. Thus, teachers can implement assessment strategies that demand students to use higher cognitive skills such as critical thinking or creative problem-solving.

By doing effective learning assessment teachers help their students become better self-directed learners and also improve the quality of the different processes at the lesson, course, and/or curriculum level.

Types and Approaches to Assessment

Assessment versus Evaluation and Grading

There is no consensus among educators that assessment and evaluation should be treated as synonyms or as two different concepts. However, if they differ in some way, it probably involves what is being measured and why and how the measurements are made. It is said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction.

With regard to the relationship between assessment and grading, the latter is considered to be a component of the former. Nonetheless, most proponents of assessment argue that grading and assessment are two different things. For them assessment measures student growth and progress on  an individual basis, emphasizing informal, formative, process-oriented reflective feedback and communication between student and teacher, while grading judges the overall quality of worth of a student’s performance in a particular educational activity in a formal, summative and final product-oriented feedback.

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