Designing Classroom Language Tests

This is brief presentation about how to desing language tests:










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Reflexion: Assessing my blog

When I read this rubric I realized that I made many mistakes in terms of citation, because every time I posted a picture from other sources I never cited them. Also, I realized that I made some grammar mistakes, so for the next time I am going to be careful with these issues.

On the other hand, I feel happy because whenever I wrote a reflexion I wrote it with my heart. I am very pleased because the things I learnt when I wrote all of this entries. Of course I must accept that at the beginning of the exercise I was upset because of the extra homework but know I can see al, the benefits of writing a blog.

Finally I have to say that I will probably continue writing in the blog randomly because now I am aware that my writing can help me to develop critical thinking and also can help other people who are looking for answers in terms of assessment in the classroom.

How to collect data and the uses of it

For collecting data people have designed many useful tools like journal, questionnaires and interviews. With this stuff we can collect personal information, educational background, perceptions, likes and dislikes. Likewise, it is important to mention that these implements play an important role when a researcher or a teacher is collecting information in order to improve their practices.

In addition to that, journals, questionnaires and interviews are very convenient because they provide secondary information about the speaking and writing skills. But, why is it important? Well, it provides valuable information for planning to assess the course and give uniform feedback to the students that are in the group.

Finally, journal, questionnaires and interviews can be applied in classrooms in order to collect data with the only purpose of solving the issues that can appeared in the classroom.

The importance of using portfolios

Assessment can be done in the classroom by using many tools. The thing is that sometimes teachers do not know the tools or maybe because of time they do not implement them. But, at this point i would like to mention that, as we have already seen before, assessment is very important in order to improve teaching practices, approach, etc.


In the classroom, one tool teachers can use to collect data and valid information about students’ performance, etc. are the portfolios. With this tool, educators can observe the way students develop competences, also, the way they think and behave.


Even portfolios are time-consuming; they are a useful tool to measure students authenticity, needs and qualities. Finally, there are three steps before teachers apply portfolios:

• Set a clear objective in order to evaluate if the objective can be covered.
• Think about the problems teachers can face considering the lack of materials.
• Time and students’ apathy about designing them.

A Framework for Evaluation

Until this point as a teacher, I haven’t realize how important was planning a framework before and through the process of teaching a course. When I was reading this I remembered what I do with my English course and I compare it with what the authors say that is here, right down:

 I realized that sometimes we do some of the things by inertia, not as well as they must have done, but still that we do it. May be at this point we make mistakes because we are beginners, even though, we are hoping to learn more thought the process and make a better job.

 Here there are some things we can do in order to assess our courses from the beginning to end of it.

•          Determine students’ needs and abilities.
•          Examine students’ progress in a regularly.
•          Provide occasions for informing students learning process
•          Monitor classroom activities.
•          Monitoring the effectiveness of instructions in order to plan on going instructions.
•         Monitoring if students understand what they were taught.
•          Monitoring students understanding of content.
•          Determine students’ needs and abilities.
•          Examine students’ progress in a regularly.
•          Provide occasions for informing students learning process
•          Monitor classroom activities.

Remember that the key of this is to make changes in the course, when it’s necessary, with the only purpose to help students to get better results at the end of their courses. 

Assessing Writing

I think writing is a very important skill because learners can use grammar and vocabulary in it, also they can show how good they are using them. Similarly, it is important to mention that writing is a skill than will enrich student’s knowledge as well as grammatical structures.

The challenge with it is that the majority of the students have problems writing in their mother tongue, so as it is inferred students at the beginning would have many problems. The thing here is to be persistent.

So, now in terms of assessment I think washback is very useful because it allows the students to rewrite what they did and realize the mistakes they are making in order to do a better job and improve their speaking skills.

The importance of the combination of the four skills for assessing listening

Sometimes we, as teachers, just care about the students performance in an specific skill, but not take into account that the performance of the four skills are very important in order to assess a competence. So, what happens with listening is that every so often teachers just focus on the performance of it but not in the whole competence of their students.

Another thing is that as I said before teachers frequently prepared test to evaluate each skill separately and they trust in the result they got. The thing is that each test cannot give professors the security that the students learn everything correctly. So, what we have to in order to assess the competence in to triangulate the results of the tests.

In addition to that Brown (2000), suggest some ways in which teachers can assess speaking as a whole and gives us some tasks:

·         Note-taking (listening-writing)

·         Editing(listening-writing)

·         Interpretative tasks(listening-speaking)

·         Retelling (listening-speaking)

As a conclusion, what is important in assessing listening is to take it into account as a whole, not just as a performance. And also as teachers we have the obligation to design a test that guarantees the students that all their process will be seen as a competence and not just as an evaluated skill.