Summary

Table of Contents:

This chapter has focused on various aspects of assessment: placement, rubrics, and final exams. It is important for an IEP to have a faculty member who is competent in basic descriptive statistics and software that can be used to describe students’ progress through the program, both to outside stakeholders, be they university administrators or sponsors, and to the IEP administrators and teachers themselves.

Topics for Administrators and Teachers to Reflect On

3.9.1 Questions and Issues Mainly for Program

Questions and Issues Mainly for Program Administrators and Curriculum Supervisors

1. Consult the websites of the language assessment journals and review the titles of articles from the past two years. Note any titles of interest and skim the abstracts for an article you may read later.

a. Language Testing: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ltj

b. Language Assessment Quarterly: www.tandfonline.com/toc/ hlaq20/current

2. Download a recent research report from a major testing organization and share it with your team:

a. TOEFL, ETS: www.ets.org/toefl/research/

b. IELTS: www.ielts.org/en-us/teaching-and-research/research-reports

3. What information from your reviews in 1 and 2 might cause you to change any assessment procedure in your IEP?

a. Placement

b. In-class assessment

c. Academic readiness

d. Other professional readiness

4. How do you share test results with your faculty? What kinds of feedback do you solicit from faculty on assessment?
5. How do you share test results with students?
6. Do you have any placement confirmation procedures? How often do students change a level after initial placement?

Questions and Issues for Classroom Teachers

1. What do you know about the research basis of your lEP’s placement, level, and final exam policies? Can you easily find out more if you need to?
2. Choose a skill that you like to teach most. How do you think proficiency should be assessed in that skill? How is it assessed in your IEP and when?
3. One method of assessment that was not discussed in this chapter was portfolio assessment for writing. Is this method of assessment used in your IEP? What do you and your colleagues think about this approach?
4. Hamp-Lyons (2007, p. 480) summarizes ‘two ends of the assessment cultures continuum. For example, a learning culture would focus more on fluency, whereas a classical testing culture might focus more on accuracy’. Brainstorm some other possible features of these two cultures and then check Hamp-Lyons’ article and see if you agree with her list. What kind of assessment cultures does your IEP embrace?

Notes

1. As we shall see in Chapter 7, quantitative assessment may not always be the only way to judge student writing.
2. See Furnham (1990) for a discussion of single and multiple trait theory in psychology as it relates to personality.
3. Chapter 4 discusses vocabulary development in much more detail.
4. I have not been able to find total numbers for the TOEFL iBT. I assume that they must be larger than IELTS, but that assumption is not based on data.
5. It should be noted that a cut score may be appropriate for the beginning of a semester for a level, but for mid-term admission, students may need to be placed in a lower level because the students in the level have progressed in their learning.

6. We will discuss frequency bands and corpora in much greater detail in Chapter 4.
7. Both Japanese and Korean have Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order, particles indicating grammatical relations, and somewhat similar phonological constraints on syllable structure. In terms of writing, however, Korean Hangul is an alphabet and Japanese relies on a three-part writing system, including kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese), a syllabary for morphology in Japanese (hiragana), and a syllabary for foreign loanwords (katakana).