Course tasks and materials

Read the following:

Cerezo, L. 2011. Introducing language assessment and testing. En S. House (coord.) Inglés. Investigación, innovación y buenas prácticas. Barcelona: Editorial Graó y Ministerio de Educación (coeditores).

You need to have read this chapter by Thursday, 20th September (11.00 to 12.00h). Please, bring your copy to class.

Print the following and bring it to clas on Thursday, 20th September (13.00 to 14.00h):

Are you testwise? & Introduction to issues in language assessment and terminology from

Coombe, C., Folse, K., and Hubley, N. 2007. A practical guide to assessing English language learners. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Read your notes and the articles assigned in Tasks 1 and 2 again and write around 300 words about the differences and similarities between the terms “assessment” and “testing”, including in your writing the different “assessment dichotomies” discussed in class. Email it to your teacher no later than Sept 26th, 2012.

Revision of the concept of “language testing” and the different purposes of language testing. In groups, each group will write a number of statements about the purpose of language testing assigned. When the poster is finished, the groups will hand it in to the teacher for revision. In a future lesson, the different posters (testing purposes/types) will be revised for editing (if necessary).

In pairs, you are going to read a composition written by an advanced proficiency level student of English (Filología Inglesa) in the final exam. You are going to read and assess it in two ways (impressionistic scoring vs analytic scoring). One of the purposes of this task is to related the assessment of L2 writing with two of the cornerstones of testing/assessment. Each student in the pair will have a different composition, and you will have to discuss with your partner:

a) what is it like to “just read and provide a score (e.g. notable, 4.5, etc.)? (Difficulties, advantages, etc.). The idea is that you start thinking about the implications of providing assessment of student learning. b) what aspects or issues arise when you set up to do a task like providing assessment on a final exam writing script? c) what do you think is necessary in order to provide objective and fair assessment of student work/performance?

Cloze test development

a) Please, choose a 250-word long text (approximately) and create a cloze. Make sure you choose an authentic English language text, not one that has been created for the specific purposes of teaching/learning English.
b)Then, pass it to a classmate for him/her to solve it. In the process of solving the cloze, your classmate should indicate what the difficulties have been in its completion. Or, at least, what the likely difficulties are that test-takers may find in completing this cloze. Do the same for the cloze developed by your classmate.

Submit it on Thursday, via email to lourdesc@um.es. Also, print it out and bring it to class on Thursday (8th November).

Free test tasks development (In groups of 4 or 5)

Visit The Complete Lexical Tutor website and develop two test tasks of your choice using the corresponding applications. Submit your work on Friday, via email to lourdesc@um.es. Also, print it out and bring it to class on Wednesday (14th November).

Below is a text used for assessing reading comprehension of advanced level English as a foreign language learners. Please, read the text and the accompanying questions. As you will see, each question includes its corresponding answer and information about the type of question and what micro-skill (within reading comprehension) it addresses.

Text: Becoming a bully magnet

Now, download Day & Park's (2005) article about the issues involved in the development of reading comprehension questions for teaching/testing purposes: Developing reading comprehension questions.

Task: Look for an authentic text of between 450-500 words in the current edition of Newsweek (Newsweek.com) and develop your own reading comprehension test trying to use an assortment of types of questions and micro-skills (according to the framework proposed by Day & Park in their article).

Read the composition you have been handed out in class. Then, correct and score it (using a 0 to 10 point scale).

To do this task you will need: the composition, a list of the most common symbols (and their meanings and examples of each), and a scoring rubric. Please, download the documents before coming to class (on Thursday, 22nd November).

(1) Marking symbols (In Word format: Marking symbols).
(2) Scoring rubric.

Develop 5 transformation items in which you assess 5 different grammatical issues (e.g, morphology, syntax, a combination of both). You can choose the grammatical contents from the different grammar reference books provided in class. For your items, make sure you use language as authentic as possible. For example, you can use language you extract from a given corpus, or you can use google to visit websites from which to extract language samples. In this case, be careful which sources you make use of!!