4. Reflection of the unit

We saw important concepts as: Competence, evaluation, assessment (formal and informal), testing and teaching and read about some authors and also we had discussed these concepts in order to understand the role of assessment in language learning and teaching.

We learn about portfolios and how they are used for assessment purposes. A portfolio was created in order to allow our teacher to assess our performance. We understand and define assessment, testing and their relationship with teaching and learning. All of us had been participating in “foro de discusión” responding to our classmates´ comments.

We looked for some reasons to assess students. A format called “Assessment audit”    made us realize on whom the assessment is for, why is important to students to be assessed and what kind of information about assessment we have to report. We designed an assessment plan using “learning objectives” to understand how they work.

We acquire consciousness about the importance of evaluate our students and assess them. Now we have the knowledge to apply properly new techniques in classroom and we are satisfied with the information presented in this unit, because is considered valuable. 

García Rubio Jesús Aldair.

Miranda Ruíz  Levid Armando.

3. The activities and instruments to assess informally.

Activities and Instruments

Informal Assessment = 50%

A)   Activities based on Top Notch 3. Unit 5 “Holidays and Traditions”

Reading:

• Reading loudly “Holidays around the world” in page. 56. Then, they are going to discuss about the article, showing their point of view and comprehension about it.

• Then look for vocabulary, meaning of foreign words and Holiday dates.    10%

• Look for the antecedents of the Holidays and what people use to do during the event.

Writing:

• The Learners write down sentences about Holidays in their country, using provided vocabulary.                                                                20%

• The Learners write down sentences correctly using the provided  grammatical structure  

                                                                                     

Speaking:

• The learner give his/her point of view about the different types of holydays (seasonal, historical and religious).                                                                                   20%                                                                                                                                    

• The learner explain with their own words what they do in their country´s holidays.

• the learner use rhythm to indicate “thought groups”.

EVALUATION

Criteria:

5- Very good reading, none or minimal errors when writing, can speak fluently and without any mistakes.

4 –good reading, have some problems in writing but the text is understandable, has a good fluency but sometimes has troubles.

3 –problems when reading such as words shifts, has lots of errors when writing, doesn’t have fluency at all.

2- Has lots of problems when reading, the sentences doesn’t make sense at all, once started speaking he/she get stuck and can’t continue.

1- Can’t speak, read, nor write.

Students	Reading (10 %)	Writing (20 %)	Speaking (20%)	Final grades	Comments
Carolina Rivera	4	4	5	44%	She is one of the most participant
Eduardo Ibarra	5	2	5	42%	He has good fluently speaking
Diego Marquez	5	5	5	50%	He is very good at the three skills
Alejandra Naranjo	2	1	4	25%	She can speak pretty well but needs to work at their writing and reading.
Brenda Ramos	4	5	4	44%	Pretty good student

                                                                                                                             García Rubio Jesús Aldair.

                                                                                                                        Miranda Ruiz Levid Armando.

2. The assessment plan

ASSESSMENT PLAN

LINGUISTIC FACTORS

Speaking activities

· Pronunciation of past sentences with -ed

· Fluency at time of giving news and responses

· Relevance in context about showing interest and surprise

· Intonation in short questions

· Accuracy with the use of narrative tenses

Listening activities

· Accuracy in the information about the three different stories

· Listening for correction of mistakes in sentences

Reading activities

· Fluency for the text The Blind Assassin

· Use of skills: main idea, opinion, skimming and scanning

· Individual reading

· Silent reading

Writing activities

· Fill in the blanks

· Answer questions

· Construct sentences

· Small compositions

· Correct mistakes

NON-LINGUISTIC FACTORS

·Effort

·Participation

·Pair works

·Organization

·Attendance

·Paying attention

AMERICAN HEADWAY 4

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LEVEL 5

UNIT 3 WHAT A STORY!

1.1 Narrative tenses and questions about amazing stories.

Learning objectives: Learners are going to predict a story from some titles and write some questions about what they would like to know, and then they will listen to three conversations about story titles and answer their questions. They will give news about stories they already know and respond questions asked by partners; using narrative sentences to describe specific situations or events and the past; simple, continuous and perfect to create questions according to the information.

1.2 Read an extract of The Blind Assassin to see the past tenses working on a real text.

Learning objectives: Learners will read a piece of text which is not extensive. They are expected to answer some questions about it. Some vocabulary is provided in order to get a complete sense of the reading and their opinion is asked to corroborate the understanding.

1.3 Showing interest and surprise.

Learning objectives: Learners will use echo questions and reply questions in order to show interest and surprise. They are going to practice with a partner saying surprising things; paying particular attention to the stress and intonation on short questions as; she has? He does? She did? You are? And so on.

INFORMAL ASSESSMENT

What would be assessed informally in a normal classroom situation?

We will focus in the reading and speaking skills because these are the one that we use the most in the classroom.

Ø  In reading we are going to assess: if the student makes the correct intonation while reading, if he can use certain micro skills depending of the needs of the text.

Ø  In speaking we will assess: pronunciation, participations, fluency, coherence and accuracy.

These abilities are important because these are the most used skills during the class and as we saw we must collect data daily from our students’ behaviors and achievements during the course. Also we saw that in informal assessment, speaking is the most important skill to evaluate; because if the students get motivate by positive reinforcement when using English in the classroom they will get encourage to keep doing it.

We need to give some points to the non-linguistic factors like pronunciation, participation, and fluency because if we do this students will start to give their opinions during the classes.

Participation will be the primordial fact that will lead us to the conclusion whether the students are involved in the class or not.

FORMAL ASSESSMENT

What would be assessed formally?

As we already saw in formal assessment we must have numbers so one of the principal tools for this is the test. We can apply tests in different areas but now we will focus on: grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing comprehension.

1. Grammar: it can be done by matching the present tense of a verb with its past form, also multiple choice tests can be used for.

2. Vocabulary: we can achieve this with filling the gaps test.

3. Reading comprehension: with true or false, a set of questions about the text that the student read.

4. Writing comprehension: it will be evaluated by filling the gaps, or paraphrasing tests.

What would be the weight?

Informal Assessment 35 %

Participation 10%

Speaking (fluency and pronunciation) 25%

Formal Assessment 65%

Grammar 20%

Vocabulary 15%

Reading 15%

Writing 15%

García Rubio Jesús Aldair.

Miranda Ruiz Levid Armando.

1. The paragraph explaining informal assessment

With this assessment we can collect information about our students' performance in normal classroom condition. In this we assess our students' pronunciation, speaking, writing, reading, fluency etc. We can find the difficulties that our students have and know whom are doing well. This type of assessment it's done during the whole course and it's pretty useful to identify problems and to give good feedbacks to the students about their problems. W e must be aware that informal assessment it's not the same as formal assessment or self-assessment. Also this is only suitable for specific situation.                             

                                                                                Levid Armando Miranda Ruiz

The informal assessment is use to collect Ss´ information during the class period. This collected data process is the base to evaluate the Ss´ performance and progress, support by designed rubrics that have guidelines for know what to evaluate and observe. Running records, student’s portfolio, student’s conference notes and so on, are some examples of what to observe. The teacher has to keep interest on the students needs to identify possible unconformities and to work on suitable solutions. This type of assessment is an important part in the evaluation process which emerged from the necessity to indentify the best way to teach and to get the students achieving learning goals.                                                                   

                                                                               García Rubio Jesús Aldair