LESSON 1: PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

the other hand, if there is a need to reteach because simply the learners need it. Moreover, assessment provides the learners themselves with feedback on how they manifested the understanding of concepts and their performance tasks. This is to give the learners and parents/guardian the chance to monitor and act upon their own improvement plans and be responsible for their own learning ladders to be contributory to lifelong learning and success.

II. ANALYZE

Why do teachers need to assess learning?

Assessment in education provides concrete evidences that a student has learned and experienced a certain process. It could prove that he/she is trained and skilled in a certain competency or discipline. These evidences may be in the form of reflection papers, exemplars, self-assessment, diary or journal entry, photographs or images, etc. The principles of language assessment are: (1) Validity, (2) Reliability, (3) Authenticity, (4) Practicality, and (5) Impact (Lam, 2018).

The goal of this activity is for you to identify the principles violated in each vignette. Read each example carefully and try to pinpoint the principles of language assessment that is being violated. If you were the teacher in the examples, what would you change to correct the situation? Write your answers on the space provided. 1. In an educational assessment, the teacher uses materials and examples not usually found in the children's local community.

2. Even though students got high scores in an assessment, the teacher found that the students merely forgot what they have learned after the exam.

3. The teacher is measuring the students' ability to pronounce words in the mother tongue correctly. However, he/she also asked about the definition of the words provided.

5. A teacher designed an educational assessment to take too much time and too much money from the students.

ABSTRACT and APPLY

Listed below are the traditional and non-traditional assessments that can be used to address the different language domains stipulated in the Mother Tongue Curriculum. Read carefully the description of each assessment.

1 Assessing

Concepts about Print

Learners need to acquire and master basic concepts of print and literature in order to achieve mature reading and writing behaviors. Book and Print Knowledge (concepts of print) is defined as knowing and being acquainted with books and how print works. Print skills also refer to the ability of readers to efficiently translate printed symbols into spoken language or meaning. It includes the proficient integration of word recognition and identification with contextual information as the student responds to prose. Young children learn concepts about print as they observe written language in their environment, listen to parent and teachers read books aloud, and experiment with reading and writing themselves. They learn basic concepts about letters, words, and sentences on classroom charts.

May Clay (1985) developed the Concepts About Print Test to formally further assess young children's understanding of written language concepts. The test has 24 items, and it is administered individually in 10 minutes. As the teacher reads the story aloud, the child looks at a test booklet with a story that has a picture of one facing the page and text on the other. The child is asked to open the book, turn pages, and point out particular features of the text, including letters, words, sentences, and punctuation marks, as the story is read.

2 Assessing

Alphabet

Knowledge (Letter Sounds and Letter

Names) 3 Assessing

Phonemic

Awareness

4 Assessing

Decoding

Skills

5 Assessing

Word

Recognition

6 Assessing comprehension of narrative texts

Alphabetic Knowledge is learners' understanding that letters represent sound so that words may be read by saying the sounds represented by the letters and words may be spelled by writing the letters that represent the sounds in a word.

Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. To test a learner's phonemic awareness skills, words have to be read aloud to him/ her twice and make him/her sound that initial sound for onset and rhymes and sound out all the sounds for word sound segmentation.

Decoding is the ability to read words by translating written symbols into the sounds of spoken language (Mother Tongue, Filipino, and English). To test the learners'decoding skills, they should be given a stimulus to pseudo words which represent the various orthographic rules of the language to be tested.

Pseudo words are to be used for this test so that we can really isolate the decoding skills of our learner; otherwise, if we use exiting or real words, students may be able to decode not because they are using their decoding skills but because they are already familiar with these words.

Word recognition is the ability of learners to read words by sight with automaticity and not resort to blending. Administering Dolch Basic Sight Words is one instrument to test your learners'word recognition skills would be to create your own Sight Word List or High Frequency Word List.

Assessing comprehension of narrative texts differ very much from informational texts because of the elements. Narratives do not have topics, main ideas, and supporting details; instead, they have theme, setting, characters, plot, and point of view.

A narration is a retelling of a story, and, in general, a story is a sequence of events (which may be historically true or false) presented in such a way that the reader's imagination can comprehend the action. The events

used in a story must have some relationship to one another; writers generally do not add events to a narration that have nothing to do with the story. For students to understand narrative texts, it is imperative that they gain sense of the story.

7 Assessing Interests

Language learning must be contextualized not just in local settings where learners can see an immediate application of the language skills they are acquiring from class. Teacher must also assess learners' interest to be able to get better contextualized learning activities that will entice students to pay more attention to the lessons.

8 Anecdotal

Records

Anecdotal records are descriptions of students' actions written as they occur or soon afterwards. The goals is to briefly transcribe what the student says or does and the context in which the behavior takes place. These accounts preserve a rich history of information about how a student learns and interacts in the school environment in combination with portfolios and checklists. Anecdotal records help teachers analyze a student's accomplishments and approach to learning overtime.

9 Portfolio

Assessment

Portfolio assessment is an assessment form where students and teachers collaborate in collecting samples of student-learning progress.This assessment form helps the learner monitor their own learning. The represented materials are meaningful collection of their work, gathered over time, that reflect learning with regard to instructional objectives. They represent their efforts and achievements, as well as their personal, academic, and linguistic growth. 10 Observation Student observations are done informally while monitoring classroom work and participation. They can also be recorded on checklists or anecdotal records. Watch students in terms of English language— both quantity (fluency and amount of language) and quality (complexity of language and use of academic language)—and evidence of thinking and learning. The purpose of observing young children is to carefully pay attention to the details of the child's behavior, record these details in a structured manner, and assess

the implications of the child's actions. Parents and teachers can work together as partners to significantly affect children's success when they base their understanding of children's growth and development on thoughtful and careful observations that are accurate and objective in nature. (Teaching and Learning Languages and Multi literacies: Responding to the MTB- MLE Challenge by Roderick M. Aguirre, MAT 2016)

Your final task in this lesson is to look for two assessments that can be used to evaluate students' learning in relation to the different language domains of the Mother Tongue Curriculum. As a class, group your collected assessments by categories (you decide on how you will cluster your assessments) and submit it as a group portfolio. For each assessment, make sure to state the following information: 1. What is the dominant language domain or macro skill being measured by the assessment? 2. What is/are the specific competency/ies being measured? 3. What grade level can this assessment be administered? 4. What do you think is the strength of the assessment and what can be done to improve it?

Lesson Synthesis:

Complete the last column of the KWL chart in Activate Activity. What did you learn about assessment after this lesson?

LESSON 2 LANGUAGE ASSESSM ENT STRATEGIES

Lesson Objectives: At the end of the lesson, students are expected to: • differentiate between various methods of assessment and its sustainability to different learning objectives; and • formulate a language assessment scheme based on various learning objectives. Instructional Materials Needed: none

I. ACTIVATE

Learning Activities:

"Most schools and most of our learning stops at knowing and we need to move that and broaden it to the doing and the reflecting," says Bob Lenz. He is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Envision Schools, a university that uses portfolio defense as its means of assessment.

What does this quote mean to you? Reflect on it and prepare to share your thoughts to the class.

II. ANALYZE

Assessment in education must have a "variety." This signifies the need to utilize different types of evidence to prove a student's development. In addition, teachers usually follow five steps in providing instructions and in scoring different assessments in education. These steps are (1) Purpose, (2) Content and procedures, (3) Criteria, (4) Monitoring, and (5) Evaluation (Lam, 2018).

The goal of this activity is for each group to create a short drama or skit. Each group will be assigned a vignette from the items below. Each scene is unfinished.

Proceed to your assigned groups and read the particular story assigned to you. Your task is to produce a short creative skit about the said vignette. Encourage every member to share their thoughts. How would you finish the story? How would you resolve the conflict?