Language Assessment

Language Assessment

1. It is most common way to measure learners’ performance and the progress they are making

   • It is not only weighing students’ results to rank their knowledge and skills at a certain linguistic level
     • Students must understand phonological, lexical, grammatical and socio-linguistic constituents of language in order to use it as a system of communication and meaning that they use to achieve their purposes and needs.
       • Language usage must be assessed because students need to be aware of the rules for making language
       • Language use must be assessed due to the communicative meaning of language
   • It is also accounting for pupils’ achievement of the communicative competence reached during the learning process
     • Third generation test
       • Learners' communicative language abilities are assessed in an integrative way, using both testing formats (objective and subjective).
         • It is assessed both knowledge of the language (competence) and the capacity for implementing this knowledge in a communicative language use (performance).
           • Tasks in this type of tests are authentic and contextualised. They have clear reference in reality.

2. Students are learning to communicate through verbal interaction that is focused more on the understanding and negotiation of meaning than on the mere reproduction of linguistic structures.

   • Harris and McCann (1994:04) assert: "It is also very important to be clear about what we want to assess and to ensure that we are assessing that and not something else, that our assessment has validity… To reach the goal of validity in our assessment it is thus very important that we have clear assessment objectives in the first place and then try to make sure that these objectives are reached."