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