The document discusses methods for assessing different language skills: listening, speaking, writing, and reading. It provides details on: - How listening comprehension is an inferential process and spoken language differs from written language. - The three parts that make up a speaking test: a task, rating scale, and rater, and types of rating scales. - The components of a reliable writing test: having students write, a focus topic, audience, rubric, and trained rater. - Factors to consider when assessing reading like testing multiple abilities, choosing authentic texts, and using multiple items/texts.

1. Assessing Skills
Dannae Del Campo – Gabriela Quezada
Listening Assessment Speaking Assessment Writing Assessment Reading Assessment
 Listening comprehension is a
process of constructing meaning. It
is an inferential process.
 The important thing to understand
is that spoken language is very
different from the written
language:
a) Firstly, it comes from sounds.
Listeners must know the sound
system and they also must
understand the phonological
system.
b) The structure of spoken
discourse is different. People
don’t speak in sentences; they
speak in idea units that are
strong together (expressions,
idioms). People hesitate when
they talk.
c) Spoken language takes place in
real time. It means that the
processing must be automatic.
 A speaking test is composed by
three parts: a task, a rating scale
and a rater.
 There are three types of rating
scales, the intuitive ones, which
are made by people in some
meetings, the empirical ones in
which the idea is to collect
sample of language from the
students. And finally there are
the analytical ones, in which the
discourse analysis is used to
analyze what the student is
saying.
 There are two types of
reliabilities in speaking tests: -
inter-rater reliability, the rater
needs to be coherent with the
way he/she assess in different
moments. Intra-raters reliability
 To test writing you need that
the test taker actually writes,
a focus topic, the
specification of the audience,
a purpose, a method for
judging (rubric) and a trained
rater.
 To make sure that the writing
is reliable you need to have
more than one task (item),
more than one judge, to
score different dimensions of
the text, to have more than
one writing occasion and to
have different scorings.
 The teacher must think in
educational goals, curricula
and syllabus, they also need
to have more than one
writing occasion, to work
 At the moment of assess reading,
it is relevant to keep in mind
more than one ability to test such
as scanning, skimming,
identification, among others.
 When choosing a passage it is
important to consider the
purpose of the students, to be
presented in an authentic way.
Moreover, it should be as real as
possible.
 We need to choose more than
one text in order to make the
assessment more reliable.
 It is important to have more than
one item in the test in order to
give equal opportunities for the
students.

2. How teachers must assess listening
comprehension.
 The teacher must give the listener
some task. Based on the
performance of the test taker the
teacher makes an inference of the
level of listening comprehension.
 Listening takes place for different
purposes. Listening comprehension
is an inferential process so it is
quite possible that people interpret
differently the same text.
 Teachers must decide the type of
interactiveness in the test
(Interactive or Non-interactive).
 Teachers should use the following
item tasks to assess listening:
dictation, statement evaluation
activities, pictures, comprehension
questions, summary of a passage,
gap filling task and information
transfer item.
Buck, G. (1998)
is when different raters can
agree with each other when
marking or grading.
 What is speaking and what we
want to assess have to be explicit
in the rating scale.
 To make more general
comments about what the
students will be able to do in the
speaking task.
Fulcher, G. (1998)
with other teachers of the
department, in order to share
pieces of writing and discuss
them. In this way, the
assessment will be not only
reliable but also valid.
 Teachers must get all
information they can from
the assessment process.
Moreover, they have to
provide feedback with
positive comments to
learners. (can do statements)
Hamp-Lyons, L. (1998)
 Multiple choice questions are
difficult to write because
sometimes they are ambiguous;
therefore, they need to be pre-
testing. A better option is short
answer question and selecting of
headings.
 For advanced readers a good
option is gapped summary, in
which the students have to fill in
the gaps with the corresponding
word or phrase in the summary
of the reading.
 Information transfer is another
good method in which students
need to say what they have
already read in a table or chart.
Clapham, C. (1998)

3. References
Fulcher, G. and Thrasher, R. Language Testing Videos. In association with ILTA, available: http://languagetesting.info.