Bryan Abos-Padilla
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Assessment of the comunicative competence in English
This entry is dedicated to the subject of Assessment of the Communicative Competence in English. This course develops various concepts related to evaluation that will helps us as future teachers to face the evaluating task in the most meticulous way possible. It also emphasizes concepts and techniques that provides to the evaluation of the fourth linguistic skills a central role within the educative process.
Adapted from the course program posted on EV@
Asignment 1: Theoretical Framework, Qualities of testing
The first topic of the course was related to assessment terminology and its qualities. In order to assess our understanding of the topics studied in this unit, we had to do a theoretical framework regarding the qualities of testing.
In this framework, we evaluate three different works of the authors Bachman and Palmer, Brown and Coombe. This work was of great importance bearing in mind that as future teachers we have to be sure that we are using evaluation to increase our student’s performance instead of punishing their mistakes.
Asignment 2: Assessment instruments
The second topic studied had to do with the construction and use of different kinds of assessing instruments.
Among the different instruments analyzed, there were rubrics. We were asked to design two analytic rubrics for different tasks, in order to evaluate the ability.
of the students to either produce or receive information using the English Language.
Personally, the most meaningful acknowledg-ment I could gather from this assignment is the process of selection of the different dimensions that will be evaluated in a determined task.
Asignment 3: Assessing Speaking
In order to evaluate speaking, it is important to consider different aspects that ought to be analyzed, while creating an effective testing tool.
The objective of this unit was to learn which these aspects were and how to analize them propperly. As future teachers, it is transcendental to know what to evaluate in the speaking competence, since it is the main goal of our teaching program. This objective is very well achieved in this assignment, since in it we had to create a real speaking task and evaluate it in order to know which its weak point were and what to do to improve them.
Asignment 4: Online performance-based assessment instruments
In this unit, we were asked to search and analyze online resources aimed to evaluate two of the three system of the language. Also, we had to develop a concept map in order to summarize a paper by Carsten Roever titled "Web-based language testing". The importance of this assignment was that we could understand the usefulness of online resources as an ally for both teaching and assessment. It is very easy for students to use and understand platforms since they are native users of digital devises. Therefore, technology is the best way to engage students into learning English for communication purposes.
Clik here to download Roever's paper