Assessing Reading Flow Map.

Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.

Reading Aloud

A student's performance when reading aloud is not a reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking ability in the way that reading aloud requires.

In addition, reading aloud is a task that students will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.

However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess whether a student is "seeing" word endings and other grammatical features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the "read and look up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text, and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if any, the student is missing.

Comprehension Questions

Instructors often use comprehension questions to test whether students have understood what they have read. In order to test comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific information, comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that support it, comprehension questions should ask about those points.

In everyday reading situations, readers have a purpose for reading before they start. That is, they know what comprehension questions they are going to need to answer before they begin reading. To make reading assessment in the language classroom more like reading outside of the classroom, therefore, allow students to review the comprehension questions before they begin to read the test passage.

Finally, when the purpose for reading is enjoyment, comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic form of assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text enjoyable and interesting (or not).

_______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/assessread.htm

The 5 Principles of Language Assessment

The first one of the 5 principles  is PRACTICALITY. This principle regards how easy a test is to administer taking into account that tests should be easy to administer, not excessively expensive, they should be planned and applied within appropriate time limits (not time consuming), and they have a scoring process that is specific and time efficient.
         
The second principle that the author points out is the RELIABILITY.  A reliable test needs to be consistent and dependable. There are some subdivisions of reliability: Student-Related Reliability, rater Reliability, test Administration Reliability and, test Reliability. To sum up, reliability  is the degree to which an assessment tool produces stable and consistent results.
          
Another principle is VALIDITY.  It refers to how well a test measures what it is supposed to measure.  Validity is also devided in different categories such as:  Face Validity, exams like Toelf that measures English and it is valid in every university in the world, and consequential validity, gives information about the benefits of dangers after taking the exam.

AUTHENTICITY regards if the items are as contextualized, if the topics and situations are interesting and enjoyable, and if the tasks are real-world tasks.

Finally, Brown mentiones the fifth priciple, WASH BACK. It includes the effects of an assessment on teaching and learning prior to the assessment itself, that is on preparation for the assessment: Informal performance assessment is by nature more likely to have built-in wash back effects because the teacher is usually providing interactive feedback. Formal tests can also have positive wash back, but they provide no wash back, if the students receive a simple letter grade or a single overall numerical score. Classroom test should serve as learning devices through which wash back is achieved.

Wash back enhances a number of basic principles of language acquisition: intrinsic motivation, autonomy, self confidence, language ego, interlanguage, and strategic investment, among others. Wash back implies that students have ready access to the teacher to discuss the feedback and evaluation he has given.

What is assessment?

 Usually it is believed that assessment is just giving students grades for the different assigments they are required to do. However, the real meaning of assessment goes beyond grading, it is really about taking into account the whole students´ process to measure their performance in certain tasks or skills, with the aim of give them feedback in order to make sure that students overcome their weaknesses to improve in future assignments.
I personally consider that the main difference between assessment and evaluation, is that assessment intends to be a helpful tool to promote improvement. Asssessment is a comprehensive decision-making process that takes into account students´ backgrounds and conditions, while evaluation is more judgemental, it doesn´t focus that much in the process but in the product, and it doesn´t  provides students with useful feedback.
Brown (2000) stated that assessment should not be confused with testting, since testing refers to the process of gathering information about a student with the purpose of measure a person´s ability in a certain domain, regarding specific competences.
The author also claimed that there are different kinds of assessment. For example, formative assessment, that is, the feedback given by the teacher to students, they make their own process of internalization of that feedback, and summative assessment, that is more like evaluation, students receive a numerical score but teacher do not give feedback at all. There are also formal and informal assessment. In the first one, students know that they are being assessed and teacher spends time preparing assessment tool, on the second one, students do not necessarily know that teacher is assessing, it could be in a chat collecting student´s ideas about a reading.
Finally, I think that getting closer to effective assessment knowledge will be very useful in career as a teacher as it is going to help me to have a better criteria in how to give my students accurate feedback and grades according to their processes, backgrounds and preformances. Some teachers are not aware of the diferrences between evaluating ans assessing and that could one the reasons why some students feel anxious towards exams.

first time when dealing with teens

After almost 3 years working with kids I decided that I was ready to start teaching big guys...I thought it was going to be easier as teenagers are more independent, they don´t ask too many questions, etc... God, I was wrong!!

They were not mean to me, neither nice...
they were challenging and they doubted about my knowledge in my area, they tested me trying to be smarter than me and making know-it-all kind of comment always adding the duh! thing after every single sentence.
I have to confess I was pretty scared and I actually felt like I was the worst teacher on earth, but the good thing was....they didn´t realized that.

Yes, fortunately my great sence of sarcasm (that was always critizised by mother) helped me to get out of that one easily.
Next day of class, even if they still were in that show-me-what-you-have-for-us attitude, class went by calmly and by the end of the day, I could see smiles in more than three teen faces.
This is only the begginig of a very personal encounter with my profession. I wanted to create a blog to share my good and bad experiences being a teacher, maybe to share tips that work for me but mainly to keep track of what I do every day for living.