Technology Tools for Language Assessment

Technology Tools for Language Assessment

• Tools for Assessment of Linguistics Skills

  • Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Spelling, Rules of discourse

• Tools for Assessment of Communicative Skills

  • Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing Skills

​TSLB3533 | Kho Chung Wei

Success Criteria

By the end of this topic, I will be able to:

• identify suitable technology tools for the assessment of different linguistics skills and communicative skills

• explore current ESL assessment practices in primary schools

​TSLB3533 | Kho Chung Wei

Assessment of Communicative Skills

• Consider at least 2 or more performances and/or contexts before drawing a conclusion --> triangulation

• We must rely as much as possible on observable performance when assessing learners.

• Observable = being able to see or hear the learner's performance

• We cannot observe the actual act nor the actual product of listening and reading.

• Using reasonably good assessment tasks, we can draw conclusions about comprehension competence from unobservable reception through the process of inference.

• The specific receptive skills form the assessment objectives

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Word Cloud

What do you consider listening skills?

Assessment of Communicative Skills (Listening)

1. Intensive = Listening for perception of the components of a larger stretch of language (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.)

2. Responsive = Listening to a relatively short stretch of language in order to make an equally short response (a greeting, question, command, comprehension check, etc.)

3. Selective = Processing stretches of discourse in order to scan for certain information (listen for names, numbers, facts, etc.)

4. Extensive = Listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language (listening for the gist, for the main idea, making inferences, etc.)

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Microskills of Listening

= Attending to smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process

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Macroskills of Listening

= Focusing on larger elements involved in a top-down approach

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What Makes Listening Difficult

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Word Cloud

What do you consider reading skills?

Assessment of Communicative Skills (Reading)

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Microskills of Reading

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Macroskills of Reading

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Strategies for Reading

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Types of Reading

1. Perceptive = involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse (letters, words, punctuation, graphemic symbols, etc)

2. Selective = ascertain one's reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language (sentences, paragraphs, simple charts with matching, T/F, MC, picture-cued, etc)

3. Interactive = identify relevant features within texts of moderately short length with the objective of retaining the information that is processed

4. Extensive = tap into a learner's global understanding of a text

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Assessment of Communicative Skills (Issues in Assessing Productive Skills )

1. No speaking/writing task is capable of isolating the single skill of oral/written production. Involvement of aural/reading comprehension is usually necessary.

2. Beyond word level, speaking/writing offers a number of productive options to test-takers. --> Tricky to elicit specific criterion --> So, make sure elicitation prompt achieves its aim as closely as possible.

3. It is important to carefully specify scoring procedures for a response to achieve high reliability.

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Word Cloud

What do you consider speaking skills?

Types of Speaking Performance

1. Imitative = Simply parrot back a word/phrase/sentence

2. Intensive = Production of short stretches of oral language to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical/phrasal/lexical/phonological relationships, e.g. reading aloud, sentence completion

3. Responsive = Interaction and task comprehension at limited level of very short conversations, standard greetings, small talk, simple request, comments, etc.

4. Interactive = Longer and more complex than responsive, involves multiple exchanges and/or multiple participants

5. Extensive = Monologue, where opportunity for oral interaction with listeners is highly limited, e.g. speeches, oral presentation, story-telling

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Microskills of Speaking

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Macroskills of Speaking

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Word Cloud

What do you consider writing skills?

Genres of Writing

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Types of Writing Performance

1. Imitative = Writing letters, words, punctuation, very short sentences (form-focused)

2. Intensive = Producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocations and idioms, and correct grammatical features, up to the length of a sentence (controlled)

3. Responsive = Respond to pedagogical directives, lists of criteria, outlines and other guidelines at a limited discourse level, e.g. connecting sentences into paragraph, short reports, summaries, brief narratives

4. Extensive = Focus on achieving a purpose, organising and developing ideas logically, using details to support ideas, demonstrating syntactic and lexical variety, engaging in process of multiple drafts --> implies successful management of all strategies and processes of writing, up to the length of an essay, research report, thesis

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Microskills of Writing

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Macroskills of Writing

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Assessment of Linguistics Skills

• Technically known as form-focused assessment

• Almost all microskills require test-takers to focus on form.

• Assessment of speaking skills --> pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, rules of discourse

• Assessment of writing skills --> vocabulary, grammar, spelling, rules of discourse

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Assessment of Linguistics Skills

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• Form is both morphology, or how words are formed, and syntax, how words are strung together; both morphology and syntax are concerned with the linguistic accuracy of

  language.

• Grammatical meaning consists of both the literal and intended messages that the form conveys. It is concerned with the meaningfulness of the language used.

• The pragmatic or implied meaning results from the appropriate language choices a learner makes during a given communicative event.

Assessment of Linguistics Skills

Types of Assessment Tasks

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• Selected response

  • Multiple-choice task

  • Discrimination task = (a) attend to input that can be either language or nonlanguage and (b) to respond in the form of a choice between or among contrasts or opposites, such as true/false, right/wrong, or same/different

  • Noticing task / consciousness-raising task

• Limited production

  • Gap-filling task

  • Short answer task

  • Dialogue completion task

Types of Assessment Tasks

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• Extended production

  • Information gap task

  • Role-play or simulation task

Assessment of Linguistics Skills (Vocabulary)

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• Tokens = all the words in the paragraph

• Types = do not count words that are repeated, only words that are of different forms

• Function words = belong more to the grammar than the vocabulary; show the association among content words

• Content words = nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

• Phrasal verbs

• Compound nouns

• Idioms

• High frequency words vs Low frequency words

• Specialised vocabulary & Subtechnical words

Assessment of Linguistics Skills (Vocabulary)

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• Prefabricated language / lexical phrases = groups of words that seem to have a grammatical structure but operate as a single unit and have a particular function in communication

  • Poly words = short fixed phrases that perform a variety of functions such as qualifying, marking fluency, and marking disagreement. E.g. for the most part, so to speak, and wait a minute.

  • Institutionalized expressions = longer utterances that are fixed in form, such as proverbs and formulas for social interaction. E.g. pot calling the kettle black, nice to meet you, how’s it going, and see you later.

  • Phrasal constraints = medium-length phrases that have basic structure with one or two slots that can be filled by various words or phrases. E.g. yours truly/sincerely and as far as I know/can tell/am aware.

  • Sentence builders = phrases that provide the framework for a complete sentence with one or two slots where whole ideas can be expressed. E.g. that reminds me of X, on the other hand X, and not only X but

    also X

Assessment of Linguistics Skills (Vocabulary)

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• Receptive vocabulary knowledge

• Productive vocabulary knowledge

• Vocabulary in context

  • linguistic environment

  • social and cultural environment

• Fundamental processes of vocabulary acquisition

  • learner's knowledge of word characteristics

• Metacognitive strategies

Assessment of Linguistics Skills (Vocabulary)

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• Steps

  1. Clarify your purpose

  2. Define your construct

  3. Select your target words

  4. Determine mode of performance

     1. receptive - recognition / comprehension

     2. productive - recall and use

Types of Assessment Tasks

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• Assessing receptive vocabulary

  • Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

  • Vocabulary matching

  • Word association

• Assessing productive vocabulary

  • Fill in the blank

  • Selective deletion cloze

Multiple Select

Which of the following multiple-choice tasks assess grammatical form?

Multiple Select

Which of the following multiple-choice tasks assess grammatical meaning?

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Multiple-choice task

• Discrimination task

• Noticing task

• Consciousness-raising task

• Dialogue completion task

Multiple Select

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Multiple-choice task

• Discrimination task

• Noticing task

• Consciousness-raising task

• Gap filling task

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Multiple-choice task

• Gap filling task

• Short answer task

• Dialogue completion task

• Noticing task

Multiple Choice

What does this task assess?

• Grammatical form only

• Grammatical meaning only

• Grammatical form and meaning

Multiple Choice

What does this task assess?

• Grammatical form only

• Grammatical meaning only

• Grammatical form and meaning

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Noticing task

• Discrimination task

• Gap filling task

• Short answer task

• Dialogue completion task

Multiple Choice

Which of the following items assess vocabulary recognition?

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

• Vocabulary matching

• Word association

• Fill in the blank

• Selective deletion cloze

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

• Vocabulary matching

• Word association

• Fill in the blank

• Selective deletion cloze

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

• Vocabulary matching

• Word association

• Fill in the blank

• Selective deletion cloze

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

• Vocabulary matching

• Word association

• Fill in the blank

• Selective deletion cloze

Multiple Choice

Which type of assessment task is this?

• Vocabulary in a one-sentence context

• Vocabulary matching

• Word association

• Fill in the blank

• Selective deletion cloze