Useful Assessment and Evaluation in Language Education

John McE. Davis, John M. Norris, Margaret E. Malone, Todd H. McKay, Young-A Son, John McE. Davis, John M. Norris, Margaret E. Malone, Todd H. McKay, Young-A Son

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781626165403, 9781626165397
• eBook ISBN: 9781626165410
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The specific—and varied—ways in which assessment and evaluation can impact learning and teaching have become an important language education research concern, particularly as educators are increasingly called on to implement these processes for improvement, accountability, or curricular development purposes. Useful Assessment and Evaluation in Language Education showcases contemporary research that explores innovative uses of assessment and evaluation in a variety of educational contexts.

Divided into three parts, this volume first examines theoretical considerations and practical implementations of assessment conducted for the purpose of enhancing and developing language learning. Part 2 addresses novel assessment development and implementation projects, such as the formative use of task-based assessments, technology-mediated language performance assessment, validation of educational placement tests for immigrant learners, and the use of assessment to help identify neurolinguistic correlates of proficiency. The final section of the book highlights examples of argument-based approaches to assessment and evaluation validation, extending this critical framework to quality assurance efforts in new domains. Adding to research on traditional and conventional uses of testing and evaluation in language education, this volume captures innovative trends in assessment and evaluation practice that explicitly aim to better inform and enhance language teaching and learning.

Part One

Connecting Assessment, Learners, and Learning

Chapter 1

Developing Students’ Self-Assessment Skills

The Role of the Teacher

RICHARD KIELY

University of Southampton, United Kingdom

THIS PAPER EXPLORES THE role and implementation of student self-assessment in language teaching. The first section describes the relationship between teaching and assessment in language education and identifies three rationales for including self-assessment in curricula. These rationales draw on second language acquisition (SLA) in instructed settings; educational considerations focusing on student participation, investment, and agency in the curriculum; and assessment theory, where the rationale supports active development of assessment awareness within language learning. The second part describes an integrated research and teacher professional development initiative to enhance student self-assessment in a language program. This initiative has two principal activities: (a) exploring teacher beliefs and cognitions about assessment and the positioning of assessment practices in their pedagogy, and (b) developing classroom activity models that teachers can adapt and integrate. The data from this process captured the teachers’ beliefs about and attitudes toward assessment and how their practice positioned assessment in their pedagogy. The analysis shows the complexities of the teacher’s role in enhancing self-assessment and the need to engage with these complexities to support transformation of programs and language-learning experiences.

Assessment in Language Education

The relationship between language teaching and testing is both close and complex. Teacher education provides an important perspective for examining this relationship; the principles and norms that shape teacher training reflect perceptions of effective teaching. Three characterizations of this relationship, which correspond to three phases of development in recent decades, can be identified: keep it out, bring it in, and hand it over.

Keep It Out

Wallace (1991) points out that teachers should focus on activities that promote learning and not concentrate on test preparation strategies. As Gitlin and Smyth (1989) point out, teachers and students have traditionally been evaluated by test results; thus, teachers are predisposed to teach to the test. In the 1960s and 1970s, when current teacher-training schemes for language teachers were developed, the dominant strategy for assessment was discrete-point items, such as multiple choice (MC) questions (Lado 1964; Oller 1979). Language-teacher education curricula (Richards and Nunan 1989; Wallace 1991) focused on the teacher’s role in facilitating learning and supporting learners rather than judging their progress or preparing them for tests. In the 1980s and 1990s, new constructs of language proficiency (Canale and Swain 1980; Swain 1985) and new frameworks for assessing proficiency (Bachman and Palmer 1996) resulted in limitations to MC formats and introduced communicative tasks as integral to language proficiency assessment (Fulcher 2000). These developments contributed to aligning language teaching and assessment; both were shaped by constructs of language use rather than focus on language form. For example, the four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—have become critical for both teaching methodology and materials development and language tests (Hall 2011).

Bring It In

Recently, assessment has been an important influence on language teaching. First, in general education, the focus on teacher talk as interaction rather than instruction meant a focus on how teachers respond to student contributions. Such interactions enable the teacher to personalize instruction to support student growth (Black et al. 2003; Tunstall and Gipps 1996). Second, in applied linguistics and language-teaching methodology, SLA-informed recommendations provide salience for classroom interaction. From error analysis to corrective feedback, styles assessment and feedback was identified as a consistently important success factor in instructed SLA (Norris and Ortega, 2000, 2001). Assessment routines thus are not merely test preparation but are integral to the kind of pedagogy that best supports language-learning processes. Ellis’s (2001) account of focus-on-forms (FonFs) teaching and Rea-Dickins’s (2006) classroom-based assessment both integrate assessment into teacher education degree programs (Andrews 2007; Johnson 2009). Once teachers understand the learning potential of assessment and its related pedagogic practices, teachers can next work with students to involve them as active and informed participants in these routines. This involved handover in the classroom, a teachers’ commitment to raise awareness about and develop capacity in monitoring and developing language-use skills.

Hand It Over

According to FonFs pedagogy, teachers take the lead in assessment; their contributions are seen as crucial to learning. However, according to assessment for learning (AfL), student involvement in assessment enhances levels of engagement, motivation, and the metacognitive and reflective skills that underpin effective learning (Black and Wiliam 1998). In language learning, research on language-learning strategies (Griffiths 2013; Oxford 2011), learner autonomy (Benson 2003, 2011), and learner investment and agency (Norton 2000), the evidence is clear: when students reflect, identify the needed change, and marshal the resources to effect this change, the likelihood of learning increases. In practice, taking control of language learning is challenging for many students. Such an approach may be inconsistent with their institutional cultures and may push the students’ comfort levels. The next sections examine in greater detail the nature of self-assessment and the challenge for teachers and students to focus on classroom learning and developing these skills.

Self-Assessment

The rationale for including the development of self-assessment skills and practices in the language curriculum is based on arguments from language learning, education, and language assessment theories.

The Language-Learning Rationale

Research supports two ways that self-assessment can drive language learning. First, in language instruction, a set of techniques informed by SLA research (Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen 2002; Ellis 2003) allows the teacher to respond to particular issues in student contributions to classroom talk: “In focus-on-form instruction the primary focus of attention is on meaning. The attention to form arises out of meaning-centered activity derived from the performance of a communicative task. For example, students might be asked to perform an information-gap task and in the course of doing so have their attention drawn to one or more linguistic forms which are needed to perform the activity or that are causing the students problems” (Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen 2002, 420).

Focus-on-form techniques are designed for students “to engage in meaning-focused language use” (Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen 2002, 422). These opportunities typically emerge in assessments in classroom interaction, usually guided by the teacher, but also by peers and by students in self-assessment. Further support for this assessment role comes from sociocultural SLA; through scaffolding in classroom interaction, teachers help students develop control of new language and enhance opportunities for language learning (Lantolf and Poehner 2008; van Lier 2007). These techniques for managing assessment within classroom interaction require effective teacher listening and response. The opportunities for learning are largely in the students; performance or attempted performance and the teacher’s response can transform student understanding. Thus, assessment is central in classroom talk, and this role requires students to actively self-assess.

A second perspective in language-learning theory emphasizes student agency in learning management (Benson 2003; Norton 2000). Capacity for taking responsibility for learning, and acting autonomously to progress it, can transform formative assessment into self-assessment, depending on student participation and investment, resulting in students taking control and developing expertise in their own learning. A similar rationale for self-assessment has also emerged in general education.

The Educational Rationale

In general education, research by Black and Wiliam (1998), Boud (1995), Gibbs (2006), and Boud and Falchikov (2007) suggests that student self-assessment progresses learning. The AfL principles set out by the Assessment Reform Group (ARG) specifically focus on self-assessment: “Assessment for learning develops learners’ capacity for self-assessment so that they can become reflective and self-managing. Independent learners have the ability to seek out and gain new skills, new knowledge and new understandings. They are able to engage in self-reflection and identify the next steps in their learning. Teachers should equip learners with the desire and the capacity to take charge of their learning through developing the skills of self-assessment” (ARG 2002, 2).

The “handover” implicit in achieving this principle involves transforming both the teacher role and the student mindset. Teachers must hand over responsibility for assessment to students and actively guide them in reflection and self-management; the complexity of this transformation has not been fully understood (Opfer and Pedder 2011). The present study explores the complexity of teachers helping students learn autonomy in developing their own “desire and the capacity to take charge of their learning through developing the skills of self-assessment” (ARG 2002, 2).

The Assessment Rationale

Self-assessment has been viewed positively as a dimension of the language curriculum for some decades (Blanche 1990; Heilenman 1990; Legutke and Thomas 1991; Oscarson 1989). Drawing on the experience of a range of assessment initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, Oscarson (1989) defines benefits for learning and classroom practice through increased awareness and goal orientation. Diversifying assessment type can reduce teachers’ assessment burden and establish capacity for autonomous learning as a program outcome. Empirical work has been in two areas. First, research has focused on self-assessment as valid, reliable, and useful and on how it can realistically reduce teachers’ assessment burden. Blue (1988, 1994), Matsuno (2000), and Huang (2010) demonstrate in statistical studies that self-assessment of writing is unreliable and idiosyncratic as well as inappropriate for formal grading contexts. In contrast, Butler and Lee (2010), Kato (2009), and Chen (2008) show that, with progress in learning and practice in self-assessment, students’ capacity to self-assess increases. Kato (2009), in a project with university students of Japanese as a foreign language, focused on goal setting and monitoring as well as consequent self-assessment. The study found high levels of student engagement with the self-assessment study, suggesting that students have a greater capacity for and perception of usefulness of responding to the texts they produce than to planning for learning. Chen (2008) found that, with increased familiarity, students’ self-assessment measures of oral skills aligned more closely with teacher assessments. More recently, Butler and Lee (2010) reiterate: “The learning aspect of assessment relates to its potential role in advancing students’ learning. By providing students with opportunities to evaluate their performance as well as giving them feedback based on the results of their assessment, students can become more aware of their own learning process and performance, and in turn they can become more proficient in learning” (2010, 6).

To appropriately guide students, teachers also need training. Rea-Dickins and Leung and colleagues have explored teachers’ work with assessment activities within school curricula and define two challenges. First, assessment schemes are complex, particularly when moving beyond correct and incorrect language use, or interpreting performance based on a scale and potential for learning (Davison and Leung 2009; Leung 2005, 2010; Rea-Dickins 2007). Second, when implementing assessment for learning, practices tend to focus on enhancing teacher contributions over student inclusion (Rea-Dickins 2006; Teasdale and Leung 2000). Thus, while the introduction of self-assessment practices requires active teacher participation, this approach could also emphasize the teacher and lesson handover to students.

Teacher Literacy

Teacher knowledge of, attitudes toward, and confidence in the role of assessment activities in learning influence the success of classroom assessment initiatives (Carless 2005; Rea-Dickins 2006; Towler and Broadfoot 1992). Fulcher (2000) and Scarino (2014), arguing for greater...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1. Connecting Assessment, Learners, and Learning
• Part 2. Innovating, Framing, and Exploring Assessment in Language Education
• Part 3. Validity Evaluation
• List of Editors and Contributors
• Index