Global Teaching Certificate II

Teaching Essentials for Language Assessment

Course Overview:

In this course, you will become a specialist in language assessment for the classroom. You will greatly expand your understandings of assessment in terms of its importance and its role in the language learning process. You will also learn about feedback as a form of assessment that is vital to second language acquisition.

We will discuss the theories, hypotheses, principles, and concepts behind the process of assessment, evaluation, and testing. We will also address the importance of general and corrective feedback. Since this course not only develops your knowledge but also your skills and competencies, you will learn how to apply a wide variety of strategies and techniques that support language assessment in the classroom. This includes learning how to create your own assessments, apply existing ones, and grade your students to award their achievement. You will also see practical examples of assessment activities, tasks, and tools for the classroom. As a way to enhance your ability to assess and grade students, you will have the unique opportunity to evaluate real speaking and writing samples. Class videos and interviews with real teachers will provide you with the insights you need to enrich your perspectives on learner assessment, including your understanding of when and how to apply corrective feedback.

By the end of the course, you will know how to proceed in class with the confidence that your overall approach to language assessment has a solid foundation.

Course Outline:

This course will help you develop both your background knowledge and teaching expertise so you know the “what”, “how”, and “why” for successful language assessment, including feedback. It is divided as follows:

Introduction: Topic & Relevance sections
Knowledge: Theory, research, and understanding the “Why”
Application: Putting theory, principles, concepts into practice
Exploration: Professional Development Tools & Practicum
Teaching Resources

Topics:

We will discuss the following in the course:

Knowledge:

Essentials: Essential aspects of language assessment, including key issues and challenges
Performance: Defining and discussing lesson aims, assessment criteria, sampling, grading, rubrics, etc.
Projects & Tests: Test design, norm- / criterion-referenced tests, implicit / explicit learning, types of projects, project-based learning, schema theory, etc.
SLA & Errors: The origins of errors, types of errors, language acquisition, fossilization, interlanguage, impact of errors on learning and student performance, etc.
Intro to Corrective Feedback (CF): Defining corrective feedback, types of corrective feedback, sociocultural theory, cognitive theory, appropriateness and timing, FFI vs. MFI, reproduction vs. production, accuracy vs. fluency, etc.

Application:

Fundamentals: Formative assessment, test development process, reliability / validity / fairness, test item analysis, building rubrics, project components, etc.
Assessment of Speaking & Listening: designing appropriate tasks and activities, sampling, learning outcomes, international standards and assessment, top-down / bottom-up processing, designing rubrics, grading, etc.
Assessment of Writing & Reading: Types of writing, designing appropriate tasks and activities, assessment of sub-skills, international standards, top-down / bottom-up processing, designing rubrics, grading, etc.
Feedback & Performance: Positive feedback, positive reinforcement, preventing mistakes and errors, tackling issues with corrective feedback, TAPS framework, formative feedback, etc.
Corrective Feedback: Strategies and techniques, input-providing vs. output-prompting, SPT and PST models for speaking, error codes and metalinguistic feedback for writing, planned vs. incidental focus-on-form, etc.