Assessment of Language Skills

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