language testing assignment "ASSESSMENT OF LANGUAGE SKILLS"

ASSESSMENT OF LANGUAGE SKILLS

I. INTRODUCTION
Assessment tests are simple and practical tests or evaluations that help to determine the skills, aptitude, and general abilities of an individual or student. There are a number of different settings in which an assessment test is utilized, ranging from grade school testing to assessments that have to do with job placement and even government benefits. 
In teaching and learning process, we usually face some kinds of tests such as written test, oral test, and many others. The students may feel unhappy and afraid of getting those kinds of tests. Before we judge the tests with our bad thought, we have to know what is the meaning and the functions of the tests in teaching and learning proses. Test is a method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, and performance. The test also has the instruments. The first instrument is method because if we want to test someone, the method which we use must be explicit and structured. The second, a test must measure about the ability of a person in general and also measures their individual ability, knowledge, and performance. The results of measurements a person’s ability can show many variations. The most important thing is the tester must know and understand who the test-takers are by knowing their experience and background.
The test may measures performance, but the results shows the abilities of the test-takers. Most of the language tests are measure all of the language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A well good test is an instrument which is providing an accurate measure of the test-taker’s ability. Well in this opportunity we will talk more about assessment. There are kinds of assessments such as knowledge assessment, ability assessment, interest assessment and personality assessment. Beside there are also the types of assessment such as formative assessment, summative assessment and proses assessment. 


1.1 Kinds of Assessment
 1.1.1 Knowledge assessments
Knowledge Assessment is test the knowledge of an individual content in areas as supervision, accounting, electronics, and hydraulic systems. There are specialized tests for these, some developed by trade associations, some by commercial testing companies.
1.1.2 Ability assessment 
Ability Assessment is measure an individual's ability to perform some mental or physical task. Typing tests and computer literacy tests are an example of this kind of assessment, as are verbal and quantitative tests. Some of the exercises in assessment center arrangements are also examples of ability assessments.
1.1.3 Interest assessment
Interest assessment is measure an individual propensity for certain occupations or careers. The Strong Inventory is the best known and most rigorous assessment of this sort. We have used the Jackson Vocational Inventory to assist an Associate in career planning.
1.1.4 Personality assessment
Personality assessment is measure habits of thinking and valuing. They do this by asking the individual to describe themselves, by having them project their thoughts onto an ambiguous stimulus such as an ink spot, or by asking them to recount elements of their past.
Some psychological tests used by companies also assess signs of psychosis, neurosis, and other elements of mental illness.. These have held up in court only when the job clearly is one for which high emotional and psychic strength is a defined requirement, such as with police or fire-fighters. There have been numerous suits related to invasion of privacy issues surrounding psychological testing. These include inquiry into past experiences and behavior, especially but not limited to sexual experiences and drug and alcohol use.


1.2 Types of Assessment 
1.2.1 Formative Assessment
Formative assessment implies that the results will be used in the formation and revision process of an educational effort.  Formative assessments are used in the improvement of educational programs. This type of assessment is the most common form of assessment in higher education, and it constitutes a large proportion of TLL’s assessment work. Since educators are continuously looking for ways to strengthen their educational efforts, this type of constructive feedback is valuable.


1.2.2 Summative Assessment
Summative assessment is used for the purpose of documenting outcomes and judging value.  It is used for providing feedback to instructors about the quality of a subject or program, reporting to stakeholders and granting agencies, producing reports for accreditation, and marketing the attributes of a subject or program. Most studies of this type are rarely exclusively summative in practice, and they usually contain some aspects of formative assessment. 
1.2.3 Proses Assessment
Process assessment begins with the identification of project milestones to be reached, activities to be undertaken, products to be delivered, and/or projected costs likely to be incurred in the course of attaining a project’s final goals. The process assessment determines whether markers have been reached on schedule, deliverables produced, and cost estimates met. The degree of difference from the expected plan is used to evaluate success.


II. HOW TO ASSESS LISTENING, SPEAKING, READING AND WRITING SKILLS


2.1 How to Assess Listening Skill
All language users perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When you decide to assess someone’s ability in one or the four language skills, you should observe their performance and then you assess their competence. And now we will talk about how to assess listening skill. In assessing listening skills, the tests are not about listen or hear something but also speak something. Both skills are related. How can you speak without listening? In addition, you should pay attention in your listening ability to manage your ability on the others language skills. 
In assessing listening skills, there are 17 different objectives such as:
Micro skills:
1. Discriminate among the different sounds of English.
2. Receive chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic,  structure, intonations, and their role in signaling information. 
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.
10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.


Macro skills
12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterance, according to situations, participants, goals.
13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real world knowledge.
14. Find the relation between events, find the main ideas and supporting ideas, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
16. Use body language and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting keywords, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension.


There are four types of listening performance such as :
1. Intensive. The components of listening with a larger stretch of language. A form of this performance is the assessment of recognizing phonological and morphological elements of language.
2. Responsive. The components of listening with a short stretch language. 
3. Selective. The purpose of this performance is to look for a general meanings and the teachers also could ask the students for example asking their names and other questions.
4. Extensive. Listening for the main idea and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.




2.2 How to Assess Speaking Skill
If we look at language performance, listening and speaking are related. We can assess oral language only in limited contexts of speaking (monologues, speeches, or telling a story and reading aloud). Speaking is a productive skills and if we want to be good in speaking we should be good in listening too. That’s why both of them are related skills. There are five basic types of speaking such as :
1. Imitative. This type of speaking performance is the ability to imitate a word, phrase, or a sentence.
2. Intensive. The second type of speaking is the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence. The speaker must be aware of semantic properties in order to be able to respond something. 
3. Responsive. This type of speaking includes interaction and test comprehension.
4. Interactive. The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is in the length and the complexity of the interaction. 
5. Extensive. This type of speaking includes speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling. 


There are 16 different objectives to assess in speaking such as :
Micro skills
1. Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants.
2. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
3. Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units to accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery
7. Use various strategic device to enhance the clarity of the message.
8. Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Produce speech in natural constituents
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
11. Use a cohesive devices in speaking discourse.


Macro skills
12. Accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
13. Use a good styles, registers, and other sociolinguistics features in face to face conversations.
14. Find the connection between events and communicate relations about focal and peripheral ideas, events and feeling, new information, generalization and exemplification.
15. Find the features, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
16. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies such as emphasizing keywords, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words and appealing for help.


2.3 How to Assess Reading Skill
In learning foreign language, reading is a basic skill which the teachers expect learners to acquire. Reading is the most essential skill for success in all educational contexts, it will help us when we create assessments of general language ability. The assessment of reading ability does not end with the measurement of comprehension. The strategy of understanding is the important factors to include in assessing learners. 
There are three types or genres of reading such as :
1. Academic Reading
Examples: General interest articles (in magazines, newspapers, etc.), technical reports (lab reports), professional journal articles, reference material (dictionaries), textbooks, theses, essays, papers, test directions, editorials and opinion writing


2. Job-related Reading
Examples: Messages, letters/emails, memos, reports, schedules, signs, announcements, forms, applications, questionnaires, financial documents, directories, manuals, directions


3. Personal Reading
Examples: Newspapers and magazines, letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations, messages, notes, lists, schedules, recipes, menus, maps, calendars, advertisements, novels, short stories, jokes, drama, poetry, financial documents, forms, questionnaires, medical reports, immigration documents, comic strips, cartoons
When we realize that the list above is only the beginning, it is to see how overwhelming to read in foreign language. The genre of a text can makes the readers feel easy to describe the contains of the text. For example if the readers know that the text about recipe, they will expect the information and ingredients from the text. The readers also have to know what is the purpose in reading a text and what strategies will we use to find the information and the main idea from the text.      


There are 14 different objectives in assessing reading ability such as ;
Micro skills
1. Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2. Save chunks of language of different lengths in a short-term memory.
3. Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
4. Recognize a core of words and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
5. Recognize grammatical word classes, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
6. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
7. Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses.


Macro skills
8. Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.
9. Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose.
10. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
11. Describe events and ideas, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
12. Distinguish between literal ang implied meanings.
13. Detect culturally specific references
14. Develop and use a battery of reading strategies, such a scanning, skimming, guessing the meaning of words from context
There are also some principal strategies for reading comprehension such as :
1. Identify your purpose in reading text.
2. Apply spelling rules and conventions for bottom-up decoding
3. Use lexical analysis to determine the meaning.
4. Guess the meaning of words, idioms, etc. when you are not certain.
5. Skim to the text for the main ideas.
6. Scan the text for specific information 
7. Use silent reading techniques for rapid processing.
8. Use marginal notes, outlines, and charts to retain the information.
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships.




2.4 How to Assess Writing Skill
Writing skills is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life. Writing has it unique side as a skill with its own features and conventions. We also know the difficulties of writing ability even though in our native language. In assessing student’s ability, you need to decide your objective or criterion. Writing also has their types of writing performances such as :
1. Imitative. This type of speaking ability includes the ability how to spell correctly. It is a level when the learners are trying to manage the mechanics of writing.
2. Intensive. This type of speaking is concerning about the importance of the meaning and the content of the text.
3. Responsive. This type is concerning about assessments tasks that require learners to perform at a limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph and creating a logically connected sentence.
4. Extensive. Extensive writing implies successful management of all the processes and strategies of writing for all purposes and this type is focusing on grammatical form is limited occasional editing or proofreading of a draft.


There are 12 different objectives in assessing writing skills such as :
Micro skills
1. Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2. Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
3. Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns.
4. Use acceptable grammatical systems, patterns, and rules.
5. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
6. Use cohesive devices in written discourse.


Macro skills
7. Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse.
8. Appropriately accomplish the communicative functions of written texts according to form and purpose.
9. Find the links and connections between events and communicate the relations of the main ideas.
10. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.
11. Correctly find the specific references in the context of the written text.
12. Develop and use a battery of writing strategies such as assessing the audience’s interpretations, using prewriting devices, using paraphrases and synonyms, and using feedback for revising and editing.


III. CONCLUSION


The assessment is an activity in teaching learning process when the teacher monitoring and judging the student’s performance in classroom activities. With this paper we can know how to assess the four kinds of language skills very clearly and how important the assessment I teaching and learning proses. We should use all the strategies and the method above to assess our student’s ability in listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill, and writing skill. We can also use the tools or devices to assess our students in our classroom activities. Bring the important and useful tools or devices to our classroom and then you can teach the students easily by sing those devices.








IV. REFERENCES




Brown, H. Douglas.2003.Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. San Francisco State University.
Buck, Gary.2001.Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.