Two issues in assessment of high school students performance in english

THANH HOA Department of Education andTraining TRAN PHU High School  EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE THEME: Two Issues in Assessment of High School Student Performance in English Researcher: Dau

THANH HOA Department of Education and

Training TRAN PHU High School



EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE THEME: Two Issues in Assessment of High School

Student Performance in English

Researcher: Dau Thi Diep Foreign Language Group Tran Phu High School

THANH HOA MAY 2016

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

A) Problem Area in Assessment

B) A Review of Relevant Literature

B1) Assessing Grammar Knowledge

B2) Assessing Oral Skills

C) Recommendations for The Current Case

Conclusion

References

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Introduction

The issues of teaching English have widely discussed and researched since English now becomes an international tool for communicating among people around the world, even among people in the same community Individuals with a variety of professionals, age, ethnics and purposes try hard not only to achieve a certain level of but also to get a required certificate of English In other words, “language tests play a powerful role in many people’s lives, acting as gateways at important transitional moments in education, in employment, and in moving from one country to another” (McNamara, 2000, p.4) Hence, the issues of testing one’s ability of English have attracted great attention of language experts From the point of view of an English educator, the author of this paper aims to discuss two issues in assessment of high school student performance in English, specifically which of the twelfth grade students Then, in an attempt to find best solutions to the involving case, the author reviews relevant literature, comparing various possible answers The last part of this paper is devoted to identifying the most suitable solution to the two mentioned problems, detailing specific recommendations

A) Problem Area in Assessment

As you can find a typical test attached with this paper, tests during the twelfth school year, even in other school years, are mainly aimed to measure students’ ability

of grammar However, the required level of grammar is quite high It is obviously that exceptions of grammar rules are tested for often One can claim that such a high level is unnecessary and causes many problems for students and relevant educators as well Learners and teachers spend a lot of valuable time practicing all that grammar stuff even though it is clear to them that what they are struggling for is hardly ever

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applied in communication Making students pay much attention to grammar also affects their later process of learning English They certainly become less fluent, even less confident once they are too conscious of grammar rules This negative effect is obviously shown in reality as at the end of a seven-year high school course students are rarely able to communicate in ordinary conversations in English

The lack of balance of measurement among four macro skills is another problem area in assessment that this paper aims to cover Oral and aural skills are completely neglected during the period of seven years of learning English at high school Therefore, no one can find even a single part which is devoted to testing speaking or listening skills in any out of twelve tests in the twelfth grade Meanwhile, speaking ability is a very key indicator of one’s English competence Also, listening skill receives very little attention Hence, one can claim that measuring listening and speaking skills is absent from the assessment of student performance Practicing all four skills in English is officially required in almost English courses in high school so

it is necessary that aural and oral skills receive much more attention in language testing

B) A Review of Relevant Literature

B1) Assessing grammar knowledge

Penny Ur (1996, p.75) over-simply defines grammar as “the way words are put together to make correct sentences” However, one can “apply the term ‘grammatical’

to units smaller than sentences” (Ur, 1996, p.75) as grammar is “the rules in a language for changing the form of the words and joining them into sentences” according to Oxford advanced learners’ dictionary, seventh edition Grammatical

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competence “will be understood to include knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics and phonology” (McNamara,

2000, p.93) The question on the adequate level of grammar which should be achieved by high school students has been an issue of debate for many years Some argue that the superficial knowledge of grammar can make no significant contribution towards achieving the communicative aim Hence, there is no point in setting the target grammatical level for high school students unnecessarily high In contrast, one may fear that “a lack of grammatical knowledge can severely limit what is understood or produced in communication” (Purpura, 2004, p.4) In reality, each educational institution requires a certain grammatical level of their learners Thus, it

is the teacher’s responsibility for guiding students to acquire the grammar necessary and to meet the grammatical requirement of that teaching situation High school students in this case demonstrate their grammar ability only through language tests designed by their own teachers Arthur Hughes (2003) has stated that all we would be looking for is some general indication of the adequacy of the student’s grammar knowledge so “the test should be guide do-able; not too difficult” (Ur, 1996, p.42) Moreover, the grammar part of the test must provide more context than only single sentences Unfortunately, the achievement test discussed here uses a list of single sentences to check the grammar knowledge Besides traditional tests, there are a variety of alternative assessments like class observation, portfolio or class activities which can be applied for the author’s teaching situation These alternative ones require students to be able to produce grammatical responses and apply grammar to some communicative purpose (Purpura, 2004, p.2) In other words, assessments of

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grammar should require students to demonstrate not only their memory capacity of grammar forms but also their language ability of understanding and applying them

B2) Assessing oral skills

Hughes (2003) believes that language abilities are not easy to measure and it has been widely recognized that speaking is the most difficult skill to assess It is absolutely true to the author’s teaching situation In reviewing earlier work, this paper concludes that testing speaking skill consists of the testing of pronunciation, spoken grammar, spoken vocabulary, and even sociolinguistic applications of speech Hughes (2003) claims that the most common format for assessing speaking ability is the interview Besides, interaction with fellow candidates and responses to audio- or video-recordings are also widely applied for testing oral skills However, “a frequent problem for teachers is when there are so many learners in one class that it seems to make it unrealistic to assess speaking” (Scrivener) The teachers who designed the discussed test are also in that situation Their class size generally ranges from thirty to fifty and each class lasts forty-five minutes per time so it is unlikely possible to assess all students’ performance at a time In this case, this assessment should be done through classroom activities, group presentations during class periods of the school year An underlying problem in testing speaking in this educational case is its scorer reliability As Mead and Rubin (1985) confirm that “a major aspect of any rating system is rater objectivity: Is the rater applying the scoring criteria accurately and consistently to all students across time? The reliability of raters should be established during their training and checked during administration or scoring of the assessment”

In some cases, it would be more reliable if students’ performance is double rated Not

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only marking learners’ performance but the teacher should provide them with a grid containing a list of specific criteria with comments As Hughes (2003) concludes that the accurate measurement of oral ability is not easy and it takes considerable time and effort, including training, to obtain valid and reliable results

C) Recommendations for the current case

It cannot be denied that grammar contributes an essential part to one’s linguistic competence However, the too much emphasis on the mastery of grammatical structures may decreases students’ fluency Thus, under the discussed circumstance, the test designers should aim to a lower level of grammar which is widely considered an adequate level for high school students Specifically, exceptions

of grammar rules need to be tested with care and are used only to distinguish outstanding individuals rather than to check ordinary students’ grammar ability One more thing to make this test authentic is that texts for checking grammar ability should not be in isolated sentences but in a specific context The teachers in charge of designing tests should be in an emphasis on grammar meaning rather than on accuracy of form Therefore, the answer to the question whether grammar tests that focus only on sentence level accuracy can be justified (Rea-Dickins, 2001) is absolutely no Moreover, the format for measuring students’ control of grammar should be varied It can be separately tested with multiple-choice questions, matching

or sentence transformation, etc at a time and through writing tasks at other time, for example In short, more effort and investment should be put into designing tests, especially into the grammar part

In regard to speaking and listening skills, it is strongly advisable to include their measurement sessions among tests, at least in one test, during the school year

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because “the motivating power of tests appears clear: learners who know they are going to be tested on specific material next week will normally be more motivated to study it carefully than if they had simply been told to learn it” (Ur, 1996, p.279) Under the author’s educational situation, teachers may encounter difficulties in measuring these skills but it is worth great effort to manage them The author of this paper is in favor of covering the measurement of the oral skill through class activities and observation such as pair work, group work or group discussion In terms of the aural skills, they can be included in a fifteen-minute test At the early stage of the semester, students should be noticed that their speaking and listening skills will be assessed during the class time and the criteria that the teacher would focus on Moreover, the teachers should give their learners comments on their oral performance

in parallel with a specific score after the testing progress comes to end In short, although speaking ability is the most difficult one to measure, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”

Conclusion

In this paper, the author has identified two issues in assessment relevant to her own teaching situation, reviewing related literature and finally detailing specific recommendations It should be repeatedly noticed that grammar tests should be guide do-able; not too difficult and testing speaking and listening skills at least once during the school year is essentially done Also, various alternative assessment ways which are more effective than the traditional tests are already presented in the paper It would be ideal if teachers could combine those assessing methods The testing issue obviously plays a vital part in test-takers’ learning process, especially in which of

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high school students Thus it is vital that test designers are aware of making assessing student performance more valid and reliable

References:

Harmer, J (2007) The Practice of English Language Teaching England: Pearson

Education Limited

Hughes, A (2003) Testing for Language Teachers Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

Mead, Nancy A & Rubin, Donald L (1985) Assessing Listening and Speaking

Skills Eric Digest Retrieved 26 May 2011, from

http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-923/speaking.htm

McNamara, T (2000) Language Testing Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Purpura, J E (2004) Assessing Grammar In Anderson, J C & Bachman, L F

(Eds.), Cambridge Language Assessment series Cambridge University Press.

Rea-Dickins, P (2001) Fossilization or evolution: The Case of Grammar Testing In

Elder, C., Brown, A., Grove, E., Hill, K … O’Loughlin, K (Eds.), Studies in Language Testing 11: Experimenting with Uncertainty: Essays in Honour of Alan Davies (pp 22-32) Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.

Scrivener, J One Stop English: Skills: Assessing Speaking Skills Retrieved 26 May

2011, from

http://www.onestopenglish.com/support/teaching-tips/skills-work/skills-assessing-speaking-skills/146607.article

Ur, P (1996) A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

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SỞ GD & ĐT THANH HOA

THPT TRAN PHU KIỂM TRA HỌC KỲ II LỚP 12, NĂM HỌC 2015-2016

Thời gian làm bài: 90 phút, không kể thời gian giao đề

Họ, tên thí sinh: ………

Số báo danh: ……….

PHẦN TRẮC NGHIỆM: TỪ QUESTION 1 ĐẾN QUESTION 64 ( 8 điểm )

Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer

to each of the following questions from 1 to 25.

Question 1: A: “ Do you have copy of The Last Leaf ?”

B: “ You are …… luck I have just one copy left.”

A by B in C of D at

Question 2: Since the flood the number of homeless people………… dramatically

A are increasing B had increased C increase D has increased

Question 3: Can you make yourself……… In French ?

A understood B understand C to understand D understanding

Question 4: Today many species of plant and animal are in……… of extinction

A danger B endangered C endanger D dangerous

Question 5: If your current rate of deforestation continues, the world’s

rainforests……… within 100 years

A would vanish B vanish C will vanish D would have vanished

Question 6: At first she was trained to be……….scriptwriter, but later she worked

as…… secretary

A the/a B a/a C the/the D a/the

Question 7: “ Don’t look so worried! You should take the leader’s comment

with………”

A a teaspoon of salt B a cup of salt C a dose of salt D a pinch of salt

Question 8: If I…………an astronaut traveling in a cabin, I’d not be annoyed by the

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A am B be C will be D were

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A the others are not B the other is not

C another is un friendly D.other lacks friendliness

Question 11: There is one person to…………T owe more than I can say

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eager to start a new day

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