Let's sum up the last weeks:

As I didn't know what specifically write about, I decided to sum up some of the most relevant points I got from the last classes. The concepts I took for my piece of writing are:  Portfolios and Giving Instructions.

Regarding portfolios,  I think that it is a challenging way of assessment that can be used as an important tool to encourage students to be more active in their learning process, since they are able to have a record of the significant things they learn, and this makes them take awareness of their own responsibility. Furthermore, portfolios can foster the learners' critical ability to write about their own criteria and reflect on what they think, why they do it and how it can affect positively or negatively their own learning process. However, when implementing portfolios, it is necessary to have a clear individual voice but also a group one. Teachers should take into account students' view as part  of the decision-making, so here is when we realize that teachers' as students' views are both important. Sometimes, there is an issue related to subjectivity, as teachers we can not grade depending on how nice my student's face is, or how friendly they seem to be; despite it is important to take into account our ideas and preferences when teaching, at the moment of assessing we have to be fair and keep in mind my students' whole process, that's why a portfolio is a very personal, formative and quialitative way of assessment.
  

Now, taking into account the important role of clear instructions when assessing, I would like to add that this is also a challenging task for the teacher. We might give our students some instructions we think are clear enough, but sometimes we don't take into account the variety of students we have; some of them might understand and some of them might not. An issue like this would affect students' performance in tests and not only regarding summative assessment, but also those formative tasks we design for our classes. Actually, the way students get used to listen, observe, analyze, understand and then go on by their own, is gonna be the one they do in their exams. So, it is important to give instructions step by step, asking them if it is understood or if there are some doubts that block their minds and here is when the exam becomes even a worse nightmare. In my point of view, it is essential to privide them with an example first, and then they'll have to face the exam, but this time they might not feel that afraid of being lost or failing the exam.

Here you have a short video and a research project that might lead us to understand better how and when to give the instructions to our SS.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED341235http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp9Qswogelg

USE OF PORTFOLIOS

Image taken from www.google.com 

A portfolio can be defined as a useful way of collecting of students’ work, letting teachers realize their effort, progress and achievements. Portfolios have a communicative purpose and are led to awake students’ creativity, since they have to decide on their own choices of  decoration and style for the portfolio. Doing this, they will be able to create more purposeful future projects.

Using portfolios is a very good idea , since they let teachers know insights about students’ use of language and the strategies they prefer to learn and practice it. If we decide to pick this kind of alternative assessment, we have to take into account that it’s going to be quite challenging, because they are time-consuming and we need to count with a wide disposition to do working on it.

Regarding a portfolio building-up process, we have to keep in mind the importance of students’ voice on its successful implementation. As this is a student-centered activity, teachers have to consider students’ opinions, discussions and contributions. They will have to come up with good and fair ideas of organization; teachers have to give them the assessment criteria, activities included in their recollection and topics to be covered in the portfolio.

Teachers should consider using portfolios as a very active and interesting way to get to students’ creativity and interactive abilities. Portfolios are based on discussions as a fundamental part of class lessons; they can be checked in groups, individually or altogether. It is  important to consider students’ needs and come up with a very good planning that should cover all those requirements for using it.

In their portfolios, students can reflect on their use of language, they can interact and create their own work as well as take responsibility on keeping it organized and interesting for anyone who would like to check it out: parents, teachers, classmates. As we see, this provokes students’ autonomy and originality.

READING FOR LIFE...

I remember that when I was a child, reading was one of the common activities that I used to do at home, but I don’t remember that my teachers were interested in motivating me to read at home or apart from the reading tasks I had at school. Reading tales was the starting point to gain this habit, but it was me and nobody else who wanted it to happen; neither my parents nor my school teachers told me about the importance of this activity.

I wanted to introduce this writing in that way, since nowadays there is the same situation but the difference is that the students have a lot of other things to do and it seems that books are being led behind or under their beds. Regarding this, I would assume that if I am a teacher that does want them to read and understand, I have to come up with a lot of innovation, strategies or activities that make them involved in the process; or at least that make them aware of the importance that reading has when presenting tests for example, and not only as concerns of passing or failing the reading comprehension section, but understanding the whole exam: every instruction or structure must be read in order to be done. But, do we really concern about it? Do we mediate our students to build a consistent reading habit for life? Or only for scanning information without skimming the deeper ideas or meaning of the text, test or any other reading passage?

When I ask myself those questions, I come to the conclusion that neither students, nor  teachers worry about it, and we would be quite wrong if we think that students will accomplish any other objectives (regarding all the skills), without a sufficient level of reading comprehension. This skill not only makes the students familiar with the language but also allows them to question themselves about the meaning, the reasons why and the message that is implicit in any other skills. In order to develop and perform successfully in those, we need to take into account that the big input we get when reading, will provide the quality of the output our students have when writing, speaking, listening or understanding grammar.

Regarding this skill, we can even notice the gaps our students have only by giving them some patterns or instructions for an activity or a test; most of them do not accomplish the task not because of they don't have a clear understanding  of what the instructions mean, but because they don't have a general and detailed knowledge about the topic  they´ve been working on. It happened to me that one of my students wasn’t the most responsible when studying or paying attention to the class, and she used to say that she did not study or practice much, but when she took the paper, she read and re-read and associated everything with the topic seen in class, and for her, that was the way to answer whatever there was. María Camila, was her name, also used to tell me about books she liked and what those were about: Everything fits, when you like it and practice it for enjoinment , it will be easier to perform well in academic objectives.

We have a behaviorist educational system that teaches us to learn to do something only for a specific objective, but that is not the idea: we cannot limit ourselves to do so; we have to construct  our own meaning, speculations. Every professional field requires reading comprehension. If you read a letter, if we look at a picture, if we want to do numeric exercises: we need to read it!In conclusion, we as teachers, have the tools to make our students aware of how meaningful reading can be. Implicitly, we can motivate them to do it, we should set up challenging reading tasks, first we guide them, then we offer a little help, and then we let them be, that is the way how we can construct a holistic knowledge and a critical vision in our learning process.

LISTENING
 WONDERFUL OR BORING!

 

 

 

 

Listening is often ignored in second language classrooms because sometimes (most of the times), teachers opt for giving students activities regarding grammatical structures. I think there has always been the belief that everything must be connected to grammar,  grammar, grammar and all that boring stuff; but what if we used some other strategies, the ones which are more practical and suitable for a real life context.

If the activities we set up are interesting and funny for my students, it would be easier to assess them too. In this entry I interviewed two friends of mine: One of them was always motivated to listen to songs and he used to like it; instead, my other friend was always asked to fill in the gaps according to the book activities and topics, she said that was a boring strategy.  Have a look at these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4IOKm3BQ8Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xixge6A45Os&feature=youtu.be

 

So, If I am a teacher, I think it’s not a good idea to follow those standards: If we are working on present perfect or simple past structures, we not only have to focus on them, It is more reciprocal when we set up a specific context, ask them to make associations about it and, If they discover that there is something present in those tenses, good! They found it out by themselves but just as a sub-part of the whole purpose. Structures are not always required, functionality is.

To have a successful listening assessment and have students be familiar with meaningful tasks, I would like to point out some kind of “Follow, do and create” criteria for this assessment process: LISTENING. This is a little summary I did and It was taken from an interesting video I found out by surfing the internet.

1.       Even we don’t give students grades; we have to find out a way to give them feedback about their listening performance.

2.       We have to set up authentic listening tasks and make sure you find the way to give students feedback after having finished those.

3.       It is important that you know if they’ve done a task like that before, because we cannot pretend to assess something that they’ve not been familiar with before. They need to practice it several times before being assessed.

4.       We have to make sure that our task be integrated into your teaching, we don’t have to wait for finishing the class period, It’s better to take notes and  observations after doing those activities, so we’ll be informed of how my students are assimilating them and improving or worsening their listening performance.

5.       We also have to take into account what language functions I’m assessing: If it is communicative language or if it is academic language. I think they enjoy the most the functional/communicative ones: songs, movies, video or even video games.

6.       We must make sure they can assess themselves too. Make them familiar with pair work may be by recording themselves and then listening to what they said. It is fundamental that they listen to their own speech as well as the teacher’s: That’s the first context they’re supposed to be in contact with. Your job is making yourself sure they’re listening correctly.

7.       Finally, take into account that peer listening is essential, but always take up a communicative purpose even when you’re regarding structures:  Ask them to have a partner conversation and give feedback one another, so they can experience a kind of “self/peer assessment”.

E.g: If you ask some of them to give a short presentation, while the ones in charge of the presentation are assessing their speaking skills, the rest of them are assessing their listening skills, and you can assess both as well. This is practical, reciprocal and they wouldn’t be as frightened as when they have to fill in a test.

 Thanks!

Andrea

 

 

 

 

Assessment vs. Evaluation

Two Controversial Synonyms

As teachers, it is supposed that one of the most important aspects we take into account when practicing our profession, is to have the aptitude and auspicious knowledge of why and when to evaluate. In second language evaluation, and I think in most of the subjects from different fields, it is necessary to take into account that this is a relevant aspect within learners’ as teachers’ process, because it drives students’ learning (Genesee and Upshur, 1999) and as a personal opinion, the fact of assessing students makes teachers aware of the self-assessment they implicitly do, since the learners’ results partly depend on the kind of instruction they receive and the teacher’s class methodology, this one as regards of self-performance and strategies to develop the class and then assess his/her students .

As mentioned above, Genesee and Upshur state the concept of ‘Assessment’ as a useful tool for students’ learning process, but we might question about the reason why he did not mention the word ‘Evaluation’ instead of ‘Assessment”, and it happens because these two seem to be synonyms, but they can be controversial, since they are related one another in the same field but both of them are addressed to different purposes.

In my opinion, ‘Assessment’ and ‘Evaluation’ can be considered as subjective research processes that every teacher does in his or her class sessions, but the results obtained during the procedure are not formally set up as a project or investigation. In this case what counts is the experience, observations and strategies the teacher comes up with, or the standards the school curriculum has to establish in order to have a well-organized education system, this one as a means of categorizing students’ level to determine if they are or not ‘fully prepared’ to go on to a more complex tier.

Regarding these two concepts, I would like you and me to question ourselves about what of the two options we have implemented so far, and if that one is the most accurate for us as teachers and the most beneficial for the learners as well. In the one hand, we have the job to test students, grade them along with different tasks and estimate the final results of their performance during a period of time; it does not matter if Fulanita’s pet died the morning of the exam, if Juanita did not study because of a problem at home, or if Pepito performed pretty well during the period, but in his final task he got a ‘terrible’ score. When we evaluate students, we take into account final results; a 3-page exam is what tells everybody if you are a brilliant or a poor student, but have we wondered the reason why it happens?; I don’t think so, because we are too busy putting those ‘reliable’ outcomes on an excel table and there is not even time to notice how big is the effort that most of our students do to have a meaningful learning process.

On the other hand, there is the human side (Robots can actually tape grades on a computer); the concept of ‘assessment’ is closely related to seeking for students’ weaknesses and strengths, and providing a constant feedback to make them aware of their mistakes or succeeds. When we assess, there is always the intention to think up better human beings with self-criteria to critique instead of judging, to experience instead of waiting and to work cooperatively, instead of isolating themselves just to get a five in their final exams.

I know that the whole idea of assessment is maybe too desirable in an education system like ours, a set of standards that are always trying to limit our ideals to final reports, final tests, final results…everything must be final, like a product in a supermarket: if it does not suit the requirements, it will not be exhibited on the shelves. But despite this, as teachers we can contribute to have students notice that education is not only about their grades; it is also about knowing each other and caring for everyone’s needs and expectations. If we demonstrate our students that we DO mind what, how and why they think so, they will be encouraged enough to fill in any exams, tasks, or even to accomplish ‘unlikely missions’; they will realize that their teachers are change agents that always seek for aesthetic experiences and critical views, so they will not perceive us, just like another brick in their school wall, but an example to preserve for a professional future.