TALKIN' L2 ASSESSMENT
How do you feel about "providing grades" aka testing?
What do you think we as language teachers can do about the issue of putting grades in vs. assessing student progress?
When are either or both appropriate?
BVP says that in his perfect world we would do away with 'tests' and only have an exit assessment. Do you agree?
Do you hate grading as much as I do? (just kidding...don't answer that)
What do you think we as language teachers can do about the issue of putting grades in vs. assessing student progress?
When are either or both appropriate?
BVP says that in his perfect world we would do away with 'tests' and only have an exit assessment. Do you agree?
Do you hate grading as much as I do? (just kidding...don't answer that)
ReplyDeleteThese are the stand out points for me:
Bill says that testing and assigning grades are what drive our curriculum. This is ironic and frustrating given his statement that these things (i.e. testing and assigning grades) are completely illogical in conjunction with measuring acquisition or proficiency.
Giving an oral proficiency test can help us determine how we need to modify our curriculum and or change our goals and expectations. We need to think about this in terms of determining our proficiency goals at the end of each level/year and whether or not our curriculum is really getting the students where we want them to be proficiency-wise. Such an assessment can be used to determine if the curriculum we're using is helping us with our stated goals. It would be great if we had district-wide oral proficiency assessments at the end of each year of instruction (i.e, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6).
Bill says, "If you have to give grades just do it just give a test and assign grades and be done with it." I find this frustrating because it is a lot more complicated than that in our communities with our administrators, with our parents, and for our students, to whom grades mean a lot.
This point struck me the most:
Feedback doesn’t really do anything, it doesn’t really help!! Research shows that feedback on written compositions doesn’t really impact language change. Why do I spend so much time grading written work and writing in all kinds of written feedback (edits/suggestions for revision). It's so hard to stop doing that, though.
Negotiation is feedback about meaning! It is through natural feedback they get during communicative events that language change occurs over time.
(Chrissy Modjahedpour)
Chrissy,
ReplyDeleteI share some of your same frustrations. I have not yet listened to yesterday's follow-up podcast (January 22) and am hoping that clarifies a few things.
I feel like I am balancing many different "paths" (for lack of a better word) in my class: oral language acquisition, written language acquisition, and enough hard data to support/justify the grade. I have not found a comfortable place where they all weave together. Of course there is some overlap, but my means of assessment and feedback vary significantly.
With respect to feedback, I have long known that students do not pay much attention to general feedback. However, I still find value in giving editing codes on essays for students to go back and make revisions. As a leverage, I offer 6% on their test grade for making those revisions. This is middle school - I can do that more easily, I know :) For other work, I have started a new system of simply scoring the work in the low range and writing on top "see me to improve your understanding and increase your score." Students then need to come to tutorial to work through the assignment with me. I often don't know if a student truly can't communicate the point or just rushed through the assignment on his/her lap on the way to school. It frustrates me to spend time giving feedback without any outcome on the other side.
As a side note on the podcast, I enjoyed the discussion about subtitles vs no subtitles. I, of course, have been doing the reverse of what BVP suggested! I have been having students listen without subtitles, then clarifying with them the 2nd or 3rd time through. I appreciated BVP's reasoning on why to show subtitles first, then work through the video clip in much smaller, comprehensible chunks.
(Susan Manly)
Hey girls,
DeleteRegarding testing and assessment...so frustrating. But until there is a systemic change to WL education (students need to pass a proficiency exam to graduate and don't get other grades) or there is some kind of proficiency = grade (still not fair) understanding, our hands are tied. Bill always says "Language is special" and we KNOW that learning language is not like learning other subjects, so to pigeon hole it like math or science leaves us with current practice.
To fight the feedback battle, one of the things that I've started doing is underlining everything that is correct. Then, at certain points of an exam, for example the email response assessments, they get a check, delta (triangle) or plus for certain aspects, like elaboration or adding cultural information, and academic language. When I hand the tests back, they have a separate grade (3 points total) for making corrections or adding in what they should have. I don't know that it helps acquisition, but it definitely increases awareness and provokes them to ask questions that they don't understand, which in turn has changed their self-assessment of what they need to work on.
Finally subtitles: They are like double input. Love them! Have you tried it yet?