TI-AIE: Supporting language learning through formative assessment

What this unit is about

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This unit is about supporting your students’ language learning through formative assessment. This kind of assessment is continuous and is carried out regularly throughout the school year. Formative assessment means collecting information about each of your students through a variety of activities, which helps you to assess their learning and progress. It will therefore help you to identify the students who are struggling, and to adjust your teaching so that you can support them. Similarly, it allows you to identify the students who are doing well and to plan how to provide them with challenging learning opportunities and use different learning materials so that they can progress. Formative assessment is promoted by the Right to Education Act 2009, as part of a curriculum that ensures the all-round development of the student.

The unit shows how you can carry out assessment of English in the course of your regular classroom teaching. It provides some ideas of how you can assess the different language skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It also has some suggestions for managing formative assessment within large classes.

What you can learn in this unit

• How to assess language learning in the course of your regular classroom teaching.
• How to assess your students’ reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in English.

Why you should consider formative assessment

Many teachers assess their students’ attainment in English through tests and exams given at regular intervals in the annual school calendar, with a final exam at the end of the school year. Tests and exams can be a good way to collect information about what students know, but they are much less useful in informing your teaching.

All teachers are concerned and interested in improving their students’ learning and progress in English throughout the year. To do this you need to undertake formative assessment throughout the school year, which is continuous – or ongoing – assessment. This means assessing each student’s progress in the course of regular classroom teaching for diagnosis, remedial action and enhancement of learning. It can include:

• observing your students as they carry out routine classroom activities, and making notes from your observations
• grading classroom and/or homework assignments, and keeping records of the grades
• keeping samples of students’ work (written, art, projects, etc.) in a portfolio
• giving short informal tests and keeping records of grades.

This type of assessment will help you understand how well each student is doing in many different areas of English. It will also help you to see which problems individual students are having, so that you can plan activities that develop their skills and thinking.

1 Assessing language learning in regular classroom teaching

It is possible to assess students during regular classroom teaching. You can observe them as they carry out routine exercises and activities. Here are some examples of such activities, and how you could use them to collect information that can be used to assess your students. (You can read about many of these activities in other Secondary English units.)

• When students are working in pairs – such as dictating sentences to each other, or carrying out a speaking activity such as a role play or an interview – you can listen, observe and make notes about aspects of the activity (for example, about pronunciation).
• Before reading a lesson or starting a new chapter in the textbook, you can ask students questions about the topic (for example, a wedding they have attended or their favourite sporting heroes).
• Whenever you ask questions of the whole class, or invite students to make suggestions, you can observe who contributes and note the language that they use.
• When students are responding to a lesson (for example, answering comprehension questions) and working individually, in pairs or in groups, you can move around the classroom and note who is struggling to answer the questions.
• After teaching some new vocabulary or grammar, you can give a quick, short test about the words or grammatical structure (for example, asking students to complete gaps in sentences).
• If students are compiling a vocabulary logbook or a literature logbook, you can review the books and possibly grade them.
• You can grade project work completed by students either individually or in groups (for example, designing an advert, writing a class newspaper or writing an episode of a TV show).
• When students are doing a listening activity – such as listening to instructions and drawing a picture, answering questions about a passage that they have heard, or writing a summary of a text – you can walk around the room and observe who is struggling and who is doing well. You can take in completed work to grade.

This list shows that there are many different ways that you can assess your students in the course of your normal teaching – you don’t have to include extra exercises and activities in order to assess your students. Using a variety of routine exercises and activities makes sure that you assess all aspects of language learning: listening, reading, speaking and writing, along with vocabulary and grammar.

You may feel that it is difficult to carry out formative assessment with large numbers of students. But it is not necessary to focus on each student in every class – you can alternate who you give feedback to and take in different students’ work each time. Students can also asses their own or each other’s work. Resource 1 has further suggestions about how you can collect information about each of your students when teaching large classes.

Once the information and evidence have been collected and recorded, it is important to interpret it in order to arrive at an understanding of how each student is learning and progressing. You then need to act on your findings to improve learning, maybe through feedback to students or finding new resources, or rearranging the groups, or repeating a learning point. For example, if you have noted that some of your students are having problems with certain areas of English (such as the use of the past tense), you could then give those students extra practice in using tenses in future lessons.

Formative assessment can help you to provide meaningful learning opportunities to every student by establishing specific and differentiated learning activities, giving attention to the students who need more help and challenging the students who are more advanced. For more information, watch the video below and read Resource 2, ‘Assessing progress and performance’.

Video: Assessing progress and performance

Case Study 1: Mr Sampath assesses his students during regular classroom teaching

Mr Sampath teaches English to Class X at a government secondary school. He attended a training session on assessment at his local DIET and learned about the benefits of formative assessment. He decided to buy a notebook in order to keep records (notes and grades) of his students’ progress in English.

After I bought my notebook, I wrote down the names of all my students and started to make notes about each one. At first, I found that my notes were often about the same students. That made me realise that I didn’t notice how some of the students in my class were doing, especially the quieter ones at the back of the room. The notebook showed me that I needed to start finding out about all the members of the class.

I started to make more effort to see how everyone in the class was doing. Let me give you an example. Recently, my students were writing the answers to some comprehension questions in pairs [see the activity in Resource 3]. As they began discussing and writing their answers, I moved to a pair and listened to their discussion. They seemed to have a good idea of the answer, so I moved to another pair. This time, it was clear that one of the students, Ramesh, was struggling with this question: ‘Anne says teachers are most unpredictable. Is Mr Keesing unpredictable? How?’

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I explained the words and sentences that were preventing Ramesh from being able to answer the question. I then went back to my desk, and made a note about him in my notebook and about how I could better support his learning in future [Table 1].

Table 1 Mr Sampath’s notes on Ramesh’s learning.

Name	Date	Activity	Comment/grade
Ramesh	09.04	Chapter 4 – reading exercise	Seems to be struggling with answering questions about the text – had some problems understanding vocabulary. Need to find some simpler texts for him to read?

Of course, I can’t write about every student in every class, but I make notes when I can, and slowly over the term I am starting to get a better understanding of each student. So for example, I can see that Ramesh often has problems with understanding the texts in the book. I am planning to talk to him to see how I can help him to improve his reading skills. For instance, perhaps he can read some simpler texts at home that I can identify for him, or maybe I could pair him with Sita, who is a friend of his and is also better than him at reading, so she could help him.

Since using the notebook, I have found that I am learning more about each student in my class. And sometimes I ask questions of students that I didn’t ask before, because I want to find out how they are all doing. I think it’s helping students to learn English too. For example, I don’t think that I used to help Ramesh very much. To be honest, I didn’t know he was struggling with reading. Now I hope that I can help him to improve his reading skills.

Surprisingly, I realised that using the notebook also helped me in other ways like analysing what each student can do or finds difficult, and so on. This in turn helps me to provide concrete feedback to students and their parents, so that everyone has a better sense of what the students do well and what they need to work on and improve. Finally, collecting and analysing information about my students’ learning also provided me with an opportunity to reflect on my own teaching methods and the materials I use, and has forced me to think about how I can teach my students in an easier and better way so that each of them learns.

Video: Monitoring and giving feedback

2 How to assess your students’ listening skills in reading and listening to English

It can be difficult to assess reading and listening skills. When students speak or write in English, you can listen to what they say or read what they write. However, when they read or listen to English, it is difficult to know what they understand. Table 2 shows some activities you can do to collect information about what your students have understood when reading or listening to a text. These activities can be carried out in the course of regular classroom teaching, or as informal tests to form part of formative assessment.

Some teachers use reading aloud as a way to assess their students’ reading skills. There are, however, some problems with using this technique for this purpose as it doesn’t really tell you how much students have understood about a passage. In fact, it is more of a test of students’ pronunciation skills.

Some teachers use dictation as a way of getting students to practise speaking, listening and writing. Dictations can be easy to mark and grade, and students can mark their own and each other’s work. However, in dictations, students don’t often focus on the meaning of what is being said, so make sure that you use other activities as well if you want to have a good idea of your students’ listening skills.

To get a sense of your students’ reading and listening abilities, it is best to use a variety of activities, with as many different texts as you can. These texts can be from the textbook, the supplementary reader or any other text (such as a story or newspaper article). For listening, you could read a short section of any of these. If you have access to a radio or a mobile phone with a speaker, you could play an audio recording. Whenever you do an activity like this, give students plenty of time to read a text, and let students listen to passages more than once.

Pause for thought After you have followed your plan for a month, answer these questions. Discuss them with a colleague if you can. What were the different ways in which you assessed your students’ reading and listening skills? Were you able to assess the reading and listening skills of all your students? How did your observations and notes help you to support your students’ learning and progress in reading and listening? Did you provide feedback to the students? Did this feedback help them to improve?

If you have a large class, it may be very difficult to assess all of your students over the course of a month. Your diary will help you to see which students you haven’t observed. Try to do as many as you can, and make sure that you don’t focus on the same students each time. It may also be possible to involve students in assessing one another in paired or group work and also in self-assessment.

Your observations will help you to see which students need help, and you can plan your teaching accordingly. For example, perhaps some of your students didn’t perform very well in the dictation. You can focus on those words or grammar points that they struggled with. You should communicate your observations to your students in the form of clear feedback, so that they can have a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses. Make sure to let your students know what they are doing well, as well as about the areas where they can improve. Give them clear tips about what they can do to improve.

Assessing your students is easier if you make a plan. That way, you can see what you are going to do, and when and how you are going to do it. If your plan hasn’t worked, make another one and try some different techniques. See what works for you and your class. The important thing is to keep trying. You can use the framework above to plan assessment for speaking and writing too.

3 How to assess your students’ skills in speaking English

Speaking is often one of the areas of learning English that is not usually assessed. However, speaking is an important skill for students to develop, and it is important to include activities in the English classroom that provide opportunities for students to speak in English. These could be telling a story, a role play, an interview or a discussion. Assessing speaking activities can tell you about your students’ progress in English, what they have learned, how confidently they can speak in English, or whether they are having problems speaking English.

Pause for thought Think about your students and classroom as you answer the next questions. If you can, discuss them with a colleague. Have you ever assessed the speaking skills of your students? How did you do it? Did you have any difficulties? If you have never assessed the speaking skills of your students, how do you think you would do it? What difficulties do you think you might have? Do you think any of the other language skills could be assessed while assessing speaking skills?

Now compare your thoughts with what some teachers do to assess speaking. Are any of these ideas possible for you and your class? Note the ones that are.

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You can use any speaking activities to assess speaking skills, especially activities where students talk about themselves or an interesting topic. Activities such as reading a text aloud are not very useful for assessing speaking skills, as the only aspect of speaking that these activities assess is pronunciation. They don’t take other aspects of speaking into account such as speaking confidently and fluently, taking part in activities, using vocabulary and grammar accurately and so on.

Often in speaking activities students are demonstrating what they have understood from a reading or listening activity. So keep in mind that when you are assessing speaking, you are often assessing other skills at the same time.

Case Study 2: Mrs Agarwal assesses her students as they do a speaking activity

Mrs Agarwal teaches English to Class IX students in a non-English medium government secondary school. She tells about the last time she assessed her students’ speaking skills.

My class was doing an interview in English. They were working in groups of four [see Figure 1]. Two had written questions and were playing the role of journalists; the other two were taking it in turns to play the role of the interviewee (on this occasion, a famous film star).

Figure 1 Mrs Agarwal assesses her students while they take part in a role play activity.

I decided to listen and assess just two groups this time. Last time, I focused on other students, and next time I will focus on some different ones.

I keep a diary for my class, and in it I make notes and keep records of my students’ performance and grades. One part of my diary is related to speaking skills, with a grid showing names, the date and type of activity, and then different aspects of speaking [see Table 4].

Table 4 A grid in Mrs Agarwal’s diary for monitoring her students’ work.

Names	Date and activity	Participation	Speaking confidently and with little hesitation (fluency)	Accurate use of grammar (accuracy)	Use of vocabulary	Pronunciation

As my students carry out the speaking activity, I stand by them, listen and make notes [see Table 5].

Table 5 A filled-in grid in Mrs Agarwal’s diary for monitoring her students’ work.

Names	Date and activity	Participation	Speaking confidently and with little hesitation (fluency)	Accurate use of grammar (accuracy)	Use of vocabulary	Pronunciation
Rahul	06.01.14, interview	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓✓	✓✓
Anju	06.01.14, interview	✓✓	✓✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✓

You can see that I just use a simple ‘tick’ system. One tick means that the student is having problems; two ticks means that they are adequate; three ticks means that they are performing very well. The grid is very quick and easy to complete. I keep these informal records about students to help to get an understanding of each student’s progress and to contribute to their overall assessment. I then share my notes with the students so that they have a sense of their own abilities and what they need to work on.

Pause for thought After trying a record sheet in your classroom, think about the following questions: Was the record sheet easy to use and useful? If not, how would you change it to make it easier and more useful? The teacher in the case study gives equal importance to each aspect of speaking (e.g. fluency, pronunciation and so on). Does this work for your class? Would you prefer to give some aspects more or less importance? How did your students respond to the feedback? Did they find it motivating?

Feel free to change the grid. If it is difficult to use, simplify it and try again. If you find that one area is not as important as another, you can award more or fewer ticks. What is important is finding a grid that works for you and your students, and that allows you to collect information about your students’ speaking skills and share it with them in a way that is meaningful and will help them improve.

4 How to assess your students' skills in writing in English

Like speaking, writing in English is not just about producing grammatically accurate sentences. Writing a text involves a number of skills, and students may have spent some time writing drafts and reviewing their own and each other’s’ work.

Now read a case study about a teacher who has just assessed some written work of his Class X students, and see how he uses questions like the ones above to grade his students’ work, and to give feedback to individuals.

Pause for thought Here are some questions for you to think about after trying this activity. If possible, discuss these questions with a colleague. Did the questions help you to grade your students’ work? If not, how could you change them to make them more useful? Did students find the feedback easy to follow and use for improvement? Could your students assess each other’s work using the questions?

You may find that the questions suggested in this activity are not completely appropriate for your students and the writing task. You can experiment with and change the questions, perhaps omitting some and adding others. Discuss appropriate questions with your colleagues if you can, or with your students.

Make sure that the questions are clear to your students and that the feedback that you give them based on the questions is simple and easy to follow. You can check this by giving them an opportunity to implement changes based on the feedback, and by checking these changes.

These questions can also be useful for students to review or assess their own work, or to use to assess each other’s written work. Therefore, it may not always be necessary for you to check and grade your students’ work, as they can check their own and each other’s. (For more information on this, see also the unit Whole-class writing routines.)

5 Summary

Assessment is important for teachers and students. It helps teachers to see a student’s progress and weaknesses, and can help them to see how they can support and help individual students’ progress with their learning. Assessment also helps students to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and know what to focus on to improve.

Assessment need not consist of tests and exams at the end of a term or school year. It can take place during the school year as part of regular classroom teaching, and you can assess regular lessons and exercises from the textbook, speaking activities and written work.

As you observe and grade regular classroom activities, as well as keeping records of grades and comments in a diary, you will begin to get an understanding of the progress of every student in your class. Sharing this with your students will help them understand what they need to do to improve. Your observations will also help you see how you can modify your teaching in order to develop your students’ skills and support their language learning.

If you would like to read more about assessing language learning, see the additional resources section.

Resources

Resource 1: Assessing students in large classes

Table R1.1 shows some example activities that you can use to assess English in the course of your regular classroom teaching. However, it can be difficult to carry this out with large classes, so the table offers some possible problems and solutions.

Resource 2: Assessing progress and performance

Assessing students’ learning has two purposes:

• Summative assessment looks back and makes a judgement on what has already been learnt. It is often conducted in the form of tests that are graded, telling students their attainment on the questions in that test. This also helps in reporting outcomes.
• Formative assessment (or assessment for learning) is quite different, being more informal and diagnostic in nature. Teachers use it as part of the learning process, for example questioning to check whether students have understood something. The outcomes of this assessment are then used to change the next learning experience. Monitoring and feedback are part of formative assessment.

Formative assessment enhances learning because in order to learn, most students must:

• understand what they are expected to learn
• know where they are now with that learning
• understand how they can make progress (that is, what to study and how to study)
• know when they have reached the goals and expected outcomes.

As a teacher, you will get the best out of your students if you attend to the four points above in every lesson. Thus assessment can be undertaken before, during and after instruction:

• Before: Assessing before the teaching begins can help you identify what the students know and can do prior to instruction. It determines the baseline and gives you a starting point for planning your teaching. Enhancing your understanding of what your students know reduces the chance of re-teaching the students something they have already mastered or omitting something they possibly should (but do not yet) know or understand.
• During: Assessing during classroom teaching involves checking if students are learning and improving. This will help you make adjustments in your teaching methodology, resources and activities. It will help you understand how the student is progressing towards the desired objective and how successful your teaching is.
• After: Assessment that occurs after teaching confirms what students have learnt and shows you who has learnt and who still needs support. This will allow you to assess the effectiveness of your teaching goal.

Before: being clear about what your students will learn

When you decide what the students must learn in a lesson or series of lessons, you need to share this with them. Carefully distinguish what the students are expected to learn from what you are asking them to do. Ask an open question that gives you the chance to assess whether they have really understood. For example:

Give the students a few seconds to think before they answer, or perhaps ask the students to first discuss their answers in pairs or small groups. When they tell you their answer, you will know whether they understand what it is they have to learn.

Resource 3: From the diary of Anne Frank

The text in this resource is taken from Chapter 4 of the NCERT Class X textbook First Flight. It discusses an extract from Anne Frank’s diary,

Resource 4: Monitoring and giving feedback

Improving students’ performance involves constantly monitoring and responding to them, so that they know what is expected of them and they get feedback after completing tasks. They can improve their performance through your constructive feedback.

Giving feedback

Feedback is information that you give to a student about how they have performed in relation to a stated goal or expected outcome. Effective feedback provides the student with:

• information about what happened
• an evaluation of how well the action or task was performed
• guidance as to how their performance can be improved.

When you give feedback to each student, it should help them to know:

• what they can actually do
• what they cannot do yet
• how their work compares with that of others
• how they can improve.

It is important to remember that effective feedback helps students. You do not want to inhibit learning because your feedback is unclear or unfair. Effective feedback is:

• focused on the task being undertaken and the learning that the student needs to do
• clear and honest, telling the student what is good about their learning as well as what requires improvement
• actionable, telling the student to do something that they are able to do
• given in appropriate language that the student can understand
• given at the right time – if it’s given too soon, the student will think ‘I was just going to do that!’; too late, and the student’s focus will have moved elsewhere and they will not want to go back and do what is asked.

Whether feedback is spoken or written in the students’ workbooks, it becomes more effective if it follows the guidelines given below.

Using praise and positive language

When we are praised and encouraged, we generally feel a great deal better than when we are criticised or corrected. Reinforcement and positive language is motivating for the whole class and for individuals of all ages. Remember that praise must be specific and targeted on the work done rather than about the student themselves, otherwise it will not help the student progress. ‘Well done’ is non-specific, so it is better to say one of the following:

Using prompting as well as correction

The dialogue that you have with your students helps their learning. If you tell them that an answer is incorrect and finish the dialogue there, you miss the opportunity to help them to keep thinking and trying for themselves. If you give students a hint or ask them a further question, you prompt them to think more deeply and encourage them to find answers and take responsibility for their own learning. For example, you can encourage a better answer or prompt a different angle on a problem by saying such things as:

It may be appropriate to encourage other students to help each other. You can do this by opening your questions to the rest of the class with such comments as:

Correcting students with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ might be appropriate to tasks such as spelling or number practice, but even here you can prompt students to look for emerging patterns in their answers, make connections with similar answers or open a discussion about why a certain answer is incorrect.

Self-correction and peer correction is effective and you can encourage this by asking students to check their own and each other’s work while doing tasks or assignments in pairs. It is best to focus on one aspect to correct at a time so that there is not too much confusing information.

Resource 5: Planning to assess your students’ reading and listening skills

Additional resources

• The Central Board of Secondary Education’s guide to CCE (continuous and comprehensive evaluation): http://www.cbse.nic.in/ cce/ index.html
• A discussion about assessment: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ article/ assessment
• Ongoing assessment: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ article/ ongoing-assessment-fun-not-fear

References

Acknowledgements

This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3.0/), unless identified otherwise. The licence excludes the use of the TESS-India, OU and UKAID logos, which may only be used unadapted within the TESS-India project.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce the material in this unit:

Resource 3: extracts from Chapter 4 – NCERT Class X textbook First Flight.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Video (including video stills): thanks are extended to the teacher educators, headteachers, teachers and students across India who worked with The Open University in the productions.