This document discusses different methods of testing, assessing, and teaching language skills. It describes various types of assessments including formative and summative, informal and formal, discrete-point and integrative testing. Over time, the field has shifted from behaviorist to communicative to performance-based approaches. Computer-based testing provides benefits like automatic scoring but lacks some human elements. Overall, assessment should be an integral part of the learning cycle and come in various forms to provide feedback and evaluate students and teaching.

1. TESTING, ASSESSING
AND TEACHING
Muhammad Haikal - TBI Unida Gontor

2. TESTING
• Brown (2004) simply defines a test as a method of
measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or performance in a
given domain.
⚬ Method: A way of how to do, techniques, strategy,
Processes, procedures, or items.
⚬ Measure: Instruments/tool to grade... specific student’s
level of competence
⚬ Performance: Ability in performing language
⚬ Domain: Specific area, Reading, Speaking, Listening,
Writing

3. • It is an ongoing process that encompasses a wider domain, such
as students:
⚬ responding to a question
⚬ offering a comment
⚬ trying out a new word
⚬ trying out a structure
⚬ writing an essay
⚬ and so forth
• What about the role of tests in assessment?
⚬ A subset of assessment
⚬ One of procedures in assessment
ASSESSING
Assessed by:
-teachers
-him/herself
-other students

4. TEACHING
• Teaching sets up the practice of language learning: The
opportunities for learners to listen, think, take risks, set goals, and
process feedback from teachers and then recycle through the skills
that they are trying to master.
⚬ Teacher-students interaction
⚬ Students must have the freedom to experiment
⚬ Students try out their own hypotheses
⚬ Freedom to practice their skills in a classroom without being formally
graded
⚬ No teacher’s judgment in terms of their trials and errors

5. INFORMAL AND FORMAL ASSESSMENT
INFORMAL ASSESSMENT
• It is designed to elicit performance without recording
results and making a fixed judgments about a student’s
competence.
• More spontaneous
• Typically occurring during instruction
• including teachers' observations & questions

6. INFORMAL AND FORMAL ASSESSMENT
• Planned in advance of their administration
• Typically occur at the end of instruction
• Students are more aware
• example include chapter tests, final exams, graded homework,
and etc
FORMAL ASSESSMENT

7. ALL TESTS ARE FORMAL ASSESSMENTS
NOT ALL FORMAL ASSESSMENTS ARE TESTS
Is a formal assessment always a test?

8. FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Formative Assessment
• Evaluating students in the process of ‘forming’ their
competencies and skills with the goal of helping them to
continue the growth process
• CHARACTERISTIC:
⚬ Evaluation during learning
⚬ Monitoring learning
⚬ Improving learning
⚬ Covering small content
⚬ providing ongoing feedbacks
⚬ Informal
it deals with the function

9. FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Summative Assessment
• It aims to measure or to summarize what a student has
grasped.
• A summation of what a student has learned implies looking
back and taking stock of how well that student has
accomplished objectives
• CHARACTERISTIC:
⚬ Evaluation after learning
⚬ Ranks and grade assignment
⚬ Evaluates achievements
⚬ Comparison through Standardized testing
⚬ Cover entire course
⚬ Formal

11. APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TESTING
• 1950’s an era of behaviorism, testing focused on linguistic
elements such as the phonological, grammatical, and
lexical contrast between two languages.
• 1970-1980’s era of communicative theories, testing
focused on the whole communicative event.
• Today, testing focused on authentic and valid instruments
that stimulate real world interaction.

12. DISCRETE-POINT TESTING AND INTEGRATIVE TEST
DISCRETE-POINT TESTING
• Constructed on the assumption that language can be
broken down into its component parts and those parts
can be tested successfully
⚬ Skill components: listening, speaking, reading, writing
⚬ Unit of language: phonology, graphology, morphology,
lexicon, syntax, discourse
• The example Test:
⚬ When I was a child I .......... in a choir.
a. sing b. singed c. song d. sung e. sang

13. INTEGRATIVE TESTING
• Oller, 1979) argued that language competence is
unified set of interacting abilities that can not be
tested separately
• The test is more than one skill and/or item of
knowledge at a time.
• The test may be either direct test or indirect test
⚬ Direct Test: Complete some sort of authentic action
⚬ Indirect Test: Measure a students knowledge about a
subject
• Common type of test: Dictation and Cloze test

14. Communicative Language Testing
(A more recent approach after mid 1980s)
• What does it criticize?
⚬ In order for a particular language test to be useful for its
intended purposes, test performance must correspond in
demonstrable ways to language use in non-test
situations.
⚬ Integrative tests such as cloze only tell us about a
candidate’s linguistic competence. They do not tell us
anything directly about a student’s performance ability.
(Knowledge about a language, not the use of language)

15. • Any problem in using this approach?
⚬ Communicative Language testing presented
challenges to test designers because they began to
identify the real-world tasks that language learners
were called upon to perform.
⚬ But, it was clear that the contexts for those tasks were
extraordinarily widely varied and that the sampling of
tasks for anyone assessment procedure needed to be
validated by what language users actually do with
language.

16. Performance-Based Assessment
• In language courses and programs around the world,
test designers are now tackling this new and more
student-centered agenda (Anderson, 2001, 2002).
• Instead of just offering paper-and-pencil selective
response tests of a plethora of separate items,
performance-based assessment of language typically
involves oral production, written production, open-ended
responses, integrated performance (across skill areas),
group performance, and other interactive tasks.

17. Any problems using this?
• Such assessment is time-consuming and therefore
expensive, but those extra efforts are paying off in the form
of more direct testing because students are assessed as
they perform actual or simulated real-world tasks.
• Important
⚬ In an English language-teaching context, performance-
based assessment means that a teacher should rely a
little less on formally structured tests and a little more
on evaluation while students are performing various
tasks.

18. • Computer-Based Testing has been increasing in recent years.
• Some computer-based tests are small-scale. Others are standardized,
large-scale tests (e.g. TOEFL) in which thousands of test-takers are
involved.
Computer-Based Testing
Advantages of Computer-Based Testing:
• Classroom-based testing
• Self-directed testing on various aspects of a language (vocabulary,
grammar, discourse, etc.
• Practice for upcoming high-stakes standardized tests
• Some individualization, in the case of CATs.
• Scored electronically for rapid reporting of results.

19. • Lack of security and the possibility of cheating in unsupervised
computerized tests.
• “Home-grown” quizzes that appear on unofficial websites may be
mistaken for validates assessments.
• Open-ended responses are less likely to appear because of the need
for human scorers.
• The human interactive element is absent.
Disadvantages of Computer-Based Testing:

20. Overall Summary
• Assessment is an integral part of the teaching learning cycle.
• In an interactive, communicative curriculum, assessment is almost
constant.
• Tests can provide authenticity, motivation, and feedback to the learner.
• Tests are essential components of a successful curriculum and learning
process.
• Periodic assessments can increase motivation as milestones of
student progress

21. Overall Summary
• Appropriate assessments aid in the reinforcement and retention of information.
• Assessments can confirm strength and pinpoint areas needing further work.
• Assessments promote student autonomy by encouraging students’ self-
evaluation of their progress.
• Assessment can aid in evaluating teaching effectiveness