The answer for 4th task of Language Testing

1. What is reading?
Reading is a complex cognitive process of constructing linguistic meaning from written symbols.
2. How should we assess reading?
• A student read out loud with the teacher making notes of the mistakes he or she makes. The teacher also listens to how the student orally structures the sentences he or she is reading to see if the reading is fluent.
• Another reading assessment evaluates the student, level of comprehension.
3. Find some example of reading assessment?
Example of reading assessment: by asking questions about a text or by having the student perform actions described in a text, evaluating texts for structure or meaning, developing interpretations of literary texts and linking them to other texts or real-word events, or finding underlying meanings such as irony or humor.
4. What is writing?
Writing is an activity in which a person express this idea, though, expression, and feelings which is used for communicating to the readers in the form of written words.
5. How should we assess writing?
Usually to assess writing there are five components, they are:
• Content refers to substance of writing, the experience of main idea
• Organization refers to the logical organization of the content
• Vocabulary refers to the selection of words those are suitable with the content
• Language uses refer to the use of the correct grammatical and syntactic pattern
• Mechanic refers to the use graphic conventional of language
6. Find some example of writing assessment?
In scoring criteria of the narrative text. The can used in writing includes five aspect of writing.
7. What is alternative assessment?
Alternative assessment is activities that reveal what students can do with language, emphasizing their strengths instead of their weaknesses, because alternative assessment is performance based, it helps instructors emphasize that the point of language learning is communication for meaningful purposes.
8. Why is alternative assessment needed?
Because alternative assessment are based on the idea that students can evaluate their own learning and learn from evaluation process. These methods give learners opportunities to reflect on both their linguistic development and their learning processes (what helps them learn and what might help them learn better).
9. What is alternative assessment are available?
10. Find some example of checklist and rubric?
Checklist :
• using resource list provided by the instructor, students contact and interview a native speaker of the language they are studying, then report back to the class. In the report they are to briefly describe the interviewee (gender, place of birth, occupation, family), explain when and why the interviewee came to the united States, describe a challenge the person has faced as an immigrant, describe how the person maintains a connection with his/her heritage.
• A checklist for assessing students’ completion of the task is shown in the popup window.
Rubrics :
a. Holistic Rubrics
The example: The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTHL) Proficiency Guidelines (1986). The ACTHL guidelines are not appropriate for classroom use, because they are intended for large scale assessment of overall proficiency and are not designed necessarily to align with curricular objectives or classroom instruction.
b. Analytic Rubrics
For example, dimensions for writing performance might include content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. Each dimension is scored separately, than dimension scores are to determine an overall score.
c. Primary trait rubrics
For example, consider a task that requires that a student write a persuasive letter to an editor of the school newspaper.
d. Multi trait rubrics
For example, on an information – gap speaking task where students are asked to describe a picture in enough detail for listener to choose it from a set of similar pictures, a multi trait rubric would include dimensions such as quality of description, fluency, and language control, as the example in the popup window shows.