Week 15’s class (4/20)

I enjoyed tonight’s class very much. First of all, we were all taking an AccuPlacer test, which is used to help students to identify their academically English performance in terms of language skills. I took TESL 1 test, which inculdes writing, listening, and reading test tasks. It took me about 30 minutes to get it done. After finishing the test, for some reason, I didn’t get my writing score back so I had no clue of where is my writing ability in this test. But it was such a great opportunity for these ESL prospective teachers to experience how a formal ESL assessment is developed and to see how they feel about this test. This would help them to consider some practical principle or steps while they are developing a test? Later on, we moved to the step of designing a test. It was a lot of fun and benefical to learn from our assessment’s sharing.

Week 15: Assessment

This week’s reading is to continue the topic of “assessment.” Two tests are discussed in chapter 24 of HDB; they are norm-referenced test and criterion-referenced test. A norm-referenced test refers to the process of comparing one test-taker to his/her peers such as TOFEL and SAT, whereas in criterion-referenced test, it only competes against a test-taker himself or herself such as the ones we take from our regular schooling classes. In addition, some practical tips to construct a test are provided in text. The testing objectives should be clear and unambiguous. And then from the objectives, you can outline and draft of your test. Revision and final-edition on your test are necessary. After administering the test, utilize the feedback and provide ample washback are important. You can use them for making your next test better. These informal assessments such as portfolios, journals, conferences, observations, and self and peer-assessments are alternatives of assessment.

Week 14’s class (4/13)

I enjoyed last Monday class. Ahmet and Jodi were giving presentation respectively at beginning of the class. Later on we’re broke into two small groups defining these statistic terms such as validity and reliability. And then each group was divided into two more groups discussing and developing an assessment based the assigned task. Then we shared our assessment with the whole class. It was fun to learn different notions of a test from the whole class.

Week 14: Assessment

This week’s reading gave me a quick review of what I’ve learnt from Dr. Stoynoff’s class, Second Language Testing. The major purpose of an assessment is to reflect what was taught in class and to see where students are in order to help them improve their skills. Test constructors should consider a good assessment is not only measure for grading, but also utilizing both self-assessment and peer assessment as well as other alternative means. To assess academic English language skills (reading, writing, listening, structure, vocabulary), test format, instructions, scoring rubric, reliability, and validity should be also taken into account. A good test format is starting with relatively easy items and then interspersing easy and difficulty items. The instructions should be brief and clear. Test constructors have to consider objectiveness of items and how long it will take to score items as well as the easier way to score. The test should be also concerned about a measuring instrument and what it purports to measure in the test.

Week 13’s class (4/6)

Last Monday I attended the Education Job Fair in Minneapolis and had interviews there. When I got back to Mankato, it was near 9 pm so I decided to skip the last thirty minutes of the class. I heard about that our guest speaker had a wonderful speech in the class. It is such a great loss not being able to come to the class. Hopefully these interviews will pay it off then. I heard from my fellow classmates that the videotape analysis will be due next Monday as is planned. In addition, we will need to work on the posters for our final presentation of portfolio project in two weeks. I’m going to talk about this with my team member next Modany.

Week 13: Writing

Teaching writing is a very complex task. This week’s reading has presented some general issues to help teachers to shape their writing classes. These issues mainly involve writing curriculum design and response or feedback to students’ writings as well as error corrections. While designing a syllabus, curricular goals, the levels of students’ writing skills, and teaching philosophy should be taken into account. These techniques, such as brainstorming, listing, clustering and free-writing, can help students to begin their writings. Feedback or response can be oral as well as written from teachers and peers. With regard to error correction, teachers can put check marks underlining errors. Besides, teachers should keep it in mind that providing all errors might overwhelm students, so they can focus on these errors that may result in miscommunication.

Week 12’s class (3/30)

Today at the end of this class, we were broke down into small groups, and shared our video selected about 10-15 minutes from our ESL teaching class with our group members. After watching, each member exchanged their thoughts/ideas about what they see from this video and responded to each other in what we could improve our teaching from their eyes. I like this activity a lot because the feedback or response we gain might be our blind spots of teaching, which we don’t see ourselves. In my case, I didn’t know that I didn’t make a clear of definition of thesis statement while teaching in the class, even after watching the video a couple of times. I think this is such a good activity for these who are prospective teachers to polish their teaching skills.