Assessment and Tests for foreign language teaching

1. Assessment

2. Formative and summative assessment
• Formative assessment: assessment for learning. It helps
teachers and learners to become aware of what has been
acquired and how much learning has turned into acquisition
and how learners can improve
• Summative assessment: assessment of learning. It measures
the learners’ progress and provides a mark. Examples of
summative assessment include: a test at the end of a
learning unit, a mid term test, an end of term test, a final
project

3. Formative Assessment
• The Assessment Reform Group in the United Kingdom defines
formative assessment as “the process of seeking and interpreting
evidence for use by learners and their teachers, to identify where the
learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to
get there”
• To do so –to find out strengths and weaknesses of each learner and
evaluate their learning process- teachers may use various techniques:
quizzes, projects, games, presentations, group activities

4. Creative assessment tools
• Wordwall can be used as a creative assessment tool. You can create a
match activity on the present perfect tense or on art vocabulary and
you can turn it into a crossword with the same vocabulary.
• This contributes to repetition in variety and to reinforcement, which
are two educational values related to formative assessment.
• Learningapps, Classtool and Jeopardylabs.com are other useful tools

5. CCQ: Concept Checking Questions
• They are used by a teacher to check that students have understood the meaning of
new language (word, grammar, function etc) or the form. CCQs need not necessarily in
fact be questions; they might, for example, be gestures, sentences for completion or
pictures but their purpose is to check understanding. They also aim at getting the
student to think about new language and draw conclusions about it, thus encouraging
inductive learning.
• Is it talking about the past or now? is an example of a CCQ that a teacher might ask
when introducing the past tense to learners.

6. ICQ: Instruction Checking Questions
• They are used after a teacher has given instructions to
make sure students have understood what they need to
do. They might refer to the language to be used in the
activity or to the procedure to use. They aim to ensure
that students are on track before they begin an activity
so as not to waste time or be confused.
• Like CCQs, ICQs are often phrased as binary
choices e.g. Must you write or talk first? Should you tick
or underline the new words?