4.4. Assessing Young Learners

Issues to consider while assessing young learners.

Age: Motor, language, conceptual and social development

Content of language learning: skills, vocabulary, language use at discourse level Methods of teaching: games, songs, stories to carry language content and practice. Aims of language learning: social, cross-cultural and language learning aims Learning theories: ZPD, social interaction.

The social realities of assessment. England: the government introduced a national curriculum and assessment at ages 7, 11 and 14 with baseline assessment at the age of 5, school entry.

Parents and teachers began to protest at the stress being felt by seven year old children and ask for a review of assessment procedures.

Malaysia: 6-year grammar exam. From age 7, pupils are tested every month every term, every year. The marks are used in some schools to place children in different groups within a class. Global scale: a new test for young learners developed by UCLES. 150,000 students were expected to take the exam in 2000.

Although the test assesses a child progress rather than awarding a pass/fail, parents often want to know whether their child has passed.

Testing has become a multimillion-dollar global business in which the need for internationally recognized certification of language proficiency works with their learners’ or their parents’ understandable demands to see proof of the outcomes of their struggle to learn and the money they have invested in it.

Wash-back effects of testing

Negative. Stress is placed on children by the demands of assessment

Individual children’s learning needs are downgraded in the push to cover the syllabus or course book before the next assessment.

Classroom activity is restricted to test preparation

Educational change is limited by the power of the assessment machinery

Positive. Attention to neglected aspects of learning (i.e.: oral language)

The effectiveness of policy, methodology, instruction, and materials can be seen.

Classroom realities. By far the most frequently used method of assessment is paper and pencil test; testing single items of vocabulary and grammar through single sentences.

Very few of the tests that were reported focused on spontaneous speaking, it seems that what was assessed was what was relatively easy to assess.

In schools and classrooms, because it is much more difficult to devise and mark oral assessments fairly, most assessment is still carried out on paper.

Principles for assessing children’s language learning. Assessment should be seen from a learning-centered perspective.

Assessment should support learning and teaching (the process and outcomes of assessment can motivate learners; an assessment activity can be a language use model, assessment activity and feedback from it can support further learning, the outcomes of assessment can help teachers plan more effective lessons and can inform the evaluation and improvement of courses and programs).

Assessment is more than testing: The test results do not reflect the big picture.

Assessment should be congruent (in harmony) with learning; interactional rather than isolated.

Children & parents should understand assessment issues: Parents need to know what teachers are doing and why.

Key Concepts in Assessment

Assessment – testing ‑ evaluation: Evaluation is the process of systematically collecting information in order to make judgments.

Formative (on-going) and Summative (end result) assessment.

Diagnostic (how much can be done for further learning) tests and achievement (what can a learner do) tests.

Strategic feedback: advice on what to do to improve the performance.

Thus, the reasons for starting with the teaching of English in primary schools are many. The aims of teaching English in Primary School correspondingly are to raise the learners’ interest in the learning of English and to keep alive that interest by motivating activities and the experience of success with the learning of the target language. They call for the development of receptive and productive skills, which correspond to the traditional four basic skills: listening (comprehension) – speaking – reading – writing. Reading and writing have a mainly supportive function in this context. Parallel to the acquisition of lexical and grammatical knowledge, which is a declarative knowledge, teachers should promote effective language learning strategies. That requires classroom activities which actively involve the learners in their own learning processes and make them experience implicitly what it needs to learn a second language. Young learners only in rare cases profit from explicit explanations of rules of grammar.

The essential conditions for learning English in primary schools are the same as for other types of second language learning: exposure – use – motivation. Language use presupposes language models and plenty of opportunity to actively use the target language in communicative exchanges. The most important model for the use of the target language is the teacher.