Assessment of English language is generally determined by assessing
the development and progress in different language skills of the learners:
Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing.
Assessing Listening Proficiency
Post-listening
activities can be used to check comprehension, evaluate listening skills and
use of listening strategies, and extend the knowledge gained to other contexts.
A post-listening activity may relate to a pre-listening activity, such as predicting;
may expand on the topic or the language of the listening text, or may transfer
what has been learned to reading, speaking, or writing activities.
In order to
provide authentic assessment of students' listening proficiency, a
post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might
put information they have gained through listening.
- It must have a purpose other than assessment
- It must require students to demonstrate their level of listening comprehension by completing some task.
To develop
authentic assessment activities, consider the type of response that listening
to a particular selection would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For
example, after listening to a weather report one might decide what to wear the
next day; after listening to a set of instructions, one might repeat
them to someone else; after watching and listening to a play or video, one
might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this
response type as a base for selecting appropriate post-listening tasks. You can
then develop a checklist or rubric that will allow you to evaluate each
student's comprehension of specific parts of the aural text.
For example,
for listening practice you have students listen to a weather report. Their
purpose for listening is to be able to advise a friend what to wear the next
day. As a post-listening activity, you ask students to select appropriate items
of clothing from a collection you have assembled, or write a note telling the
friend what to wear, or provide oral advice to another student (who has not
heard the weather report). To evaluate listening comprehension, you use a
checklist containing specific features of the forecast, marking those that are
reflected in the student's clothing recommendations.
Speaking
Proficiency Assessment
Listening and speaking are
reciprocal skills. Therefore, evaluation process of both the skills should go
side by side. So far we have discussed the process of assessment of listening
skill along with that limited assessment of speaking can be done.
Several
speaking proficiency assessments have been developed by different agencies and
institutions to fulfil different purposes of speaking. But speaking proficiency
can be evaluated through following activities:
1.
Simple classroom interaction in
English
2.
Formal and informal
conversation between teacher and students, students and students in the
presence of teacher as an evaluator
3.
By organising debate
competition
4.
Elocution
5.
Speech competition
6.
Recitation competition
7.
Loud reading sessions
8.
Oral structure practices
9.
Spelling-pronunciation test
10.
By asking question around a
subject or context
