Language assesment

Series editors’ preface to Assessing Grammar Grammar, the structural glue, the “code” of language, is arguably at the heart of language use, whether this involves speaking, listening, readingor writing. Grammar has also been central to language teaching andassessment historically, from the Middle Ages, when “rhetoric” was a key component of a university education, to the “skills-and-components” models of the 1960s that informed both language pedagogy and languagetesting. Acknowledgments In the late 1990s when Lyle Bachman and Charles Alderson invited me to write a book on assessing grammar, the resurging interest in grammar in the field of applied linguistics had already been well underway, and I was delighted. I knew there was no other book on assessing grammatical ability, and I knew this would be a challenge. In the next five years, I worked continuously on this book and am deeply grateful that Lyle, Charles and Mickey Bonin, then of Cambridge University Press, never lost faith that

CHAPTER 8  ASSESSING READING  Is readffig so natural and normal that learners should simply be exposed to written texts with no particular instruction? Will they just absorb the skills necessary to. convert the perception Clf a handful of letters ipto meaningful chunks of iruormation? Not necissarlly. For Learners of English, two primary es must be cleared in order to become efficient readers. First, they need to be 'able to master fundamental bottom-up strategies for processing separate letters, words, and phrases, as well as top-down, conceptually driven strategies for comprehension. Second, as part of that top-down approach, second language readers must develop appropriate content and formal schemata-background information and cultural experience-to carry out those interpretations effectively. TYPES{GENRES}; OF READING     Each type or genre of written text has its own set of governing rules and conventions. A reader must be able to anticipate those conventions in order to proce

CHAPTER 6 ASSESSING LISTENING  OBSERVING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FOUR SKILLS  Before focusing on listening itself, think about the two interacting concepts of performance and observation. All language users perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They of course rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances.When you propose to assess someone's ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person's competence, but you observe the person'sperformance. Sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence: a bad night's rest, illness, an emotional distraction, test anxiety, a memory block, or other student-related reliability factors could affect performance, thereby providing an unreliable measure of actual competence. So, one important principle for assessing a learner's competence is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance, such as that produced in a test. As

BEYOND TEST: ALTERNATIVES IN ASSESSMENT to speak of alter'native assessments is counterproductive because the term implies something new and different that may be "exempt from the requirements ofresponsible test construction" (p. 657). So they proposed to refer to "alternatives" in assessment instead. Their term is a perfect fit within a model that considers tests as a subset of assessJllent. Throughout this book, you have been reminded· that all tests are assessments but, more important, that not all assessments are tests. THE DILEMMA OF MAXIMIZING BOTH PRACTICALITY AND WASHBACK The principal purpose of this chapter is to examine-some of the alternatives in assessment that are markedly different from formal tests. Tests, especially large-scale standardized tests, tend to be one-shot performances that are timed, multiple-chOice, decontextualized, norm-referenced, and that foster extrinsic motivation. On the other hand, tasks like portfolios, journals, and s