Reflection+on+Evaluating+Language+Performance+by+Emrullah+Yasin+Çiftçi

The Office of English Language Programs in the United States has been offering webinar courses entitled “Shaping the Way We Teach English” for six years. This year they offer sixth webinar course. The 5 online seminars of the course cover a variety of topics and are intended for teachers of English or future teachers of English around the world. The course has also a Ning page (http://www.shapingenglish.ning.com) which enables participants to participate in discussions, view or download video and other materials from the sessions and access recordings of the webinar. The series started on April 18th and it will last till June 13th, 2012. I have chosen the third seminar entitled “Evaluating Language Performance” by Janet Orr who is an elected member (2011-2013) of the Board of Directors of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International Association. She is an education consultant focused on improving primary education, English language curriculum and instruction, program evaluation, and workforce programs for youth. She graduated from University of Colorado, University of Illinois and holds School Principal Certification from University of Virginia. The seminar was on May 16th, 2012 and it lasted for 90 minutes. In this seminar, she firstly emphasized the importance of effective instruction for students’ language competence during learning. She gave brief information about how to conduct assessments to learn what students know and do not know. She provided the difference between assessment and evaluation. She mentioned that assessments allow teachers to adjust lessons effectively on the students’ knowledge. She said as students begin to learn English, teachers will focus on assessing phonemic awareness and phonics of English sounds. Later, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension assessment become essential for identifying students’ strengths and needs as they learn. After all crucial information about language evaluation and assessment, she provided some useful assessment tools such as gap filling, completion items, multiple choice, free completion, cloze tests, story retell, matching, rubrics, progress folders, portfolios and index cards on a ring. What I found the most useful is that I have learned the difference between evaluation and assessment clearly. Assessment is finding out what students know based on learning goals by gathering information. For example, a teacher uses a rubric to assess the writing skills of a student. Evaluation occurs when value judgment is passed on student performance. For instance, a teacher grades essay of a student. Also, I like the idea of record keeping as an assessment. Among record keeping types, I like index cards on a ring the most. There is an index card for each student and all of these cards are hold by a ring together. A teacher can note everything about students on these index cards with everything as a useful assessment technique. Also, I liked progress folders or portfolios. They include the progress of students also records for parents.
 * “Evaluating Language Performance” by Janet Orr **

What I didn’t like during this seminar was that we had almost no chance to ask questions because there were too many people and all of them wanted to ask something, so we couldn’t ask anything. Also, I didn’t understand some parts because she was so fast and she didn’t provide enough examples. I would ask whether she knows anything about usage of these assessment techniques in real life or whether she knows any studies and their results about that issue. However, I couldn’t ask. Her assessment techniques seemed that they are applicable with all levels and she provided different techniques for different skills.

All in all, we all agree that it is very crucial that the teacher should check whether his/ her students understand the instructions and lessons or not. Since the teachers get ensured that the students fully understand, he can carry on the lesson. The teachers give some hints and elicit words, phrases, sentences or information during the lessons. Also, teacherscan give room to the rest of the class to share and help each other. This is called scaffolding which was also mentioned during the seminar. Without assessment, students can't perform language performance. Language performance covers linguistic competence (grammar, lexis), pragmatic competence (functional uses of language), and sociolinguistics competence (norms of language in context). All in all, teachers cannot ignore assessment and evaluation for their lessons and they are indispensable parts of teaching English. Thus, a teacher should be up to date in this area and s/he should follow all the innovative techniques.

EMRULLAH YASİN ÇİFTÇİ