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.
| Activity | Example |
|---|---|
| Comprehension questions | Students listen to or read a passage in English, and answer questions about it. You can use questions from the textbook, write your own, or even ask students to write questions. Questions and answers can be in English or your home language. This can be very beneficial for students who can read or listen to texts well, but struggle to write in English. If they can write in their home language, they can say what they have understood. It can be useful for students to review questions before they start reading or writing, so that they know what they need to find or listen out for. |
| Writing summaries | Students listen to or read a passage in English and write a summary about what they have understood. This can be written in the home language so that you are not assessing the students’ writing skills but whether they have understood what they have heard or read. You can encourage students to take notes as they listen or read. They can use these notes to write the summaries. |
| Discussions | Students can talk or write about what they found interesting or enjoyable in a text. This can be particularly useful with texts from the supplementary reader. They can discuss in English or the home language, as the purpose of doing this is to find out what they have understood. |
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.
Activity 2: Try in the classroom – planning to assess your students’ listening and reading skills
In the text above, you read about a variety of techniques that you can use in your regular classroom teaching to assess your students’ skills at reading and listening (such as writing summaries, dictation, etc.). Make a copy of the table below and fill in how you are going to use the techniques over the next month. You will find a completed table with examples in Resource 5.
| Class and chapter | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Week | Activity | In what ways will I assess the students during this activity? | How will I modify my teaching as a response? |
| 1 | |||
| 2 | |||
| 3 | |||
| 4 | |||
 Pause for thought After you have followed your plan for a month, answer these questions. Discuss them with a colleague if you can.
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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.
1 Assessing language learning in regular classroom teaching