Reading is fundamental

At the beginning of our teaching process, the majority of teachers just thought about many concerns related to students´ learning process. In our minds there were many questions that couldn’t be answered because we didn’t know how to deal with. It was pretty difficult to affirm if what we were doing were correct or incorrect just because we threw ourselves into the void without taking into account theories, authors, theoretical support, etc.   

Now that that we have read about their processes, how they acquire and synthetize knowledge, their ways of learning, factors that affect them, their performances, etc,  we can have a clear idea of how to teach or assess learners. Language acquisition is a process and we can’t pretend they acquire everything in the first class and just store this knowledge in their minds; many abilities are unobservable and we can’t see the process.  In this moment is when assessment becomes more complex because it´s just by inference and we as teachers should start to rethink and consider more factors that simple give them a grade.  

Talking about these unobservable abilities, reading is one of these skills that must be taken into consideration because many people have thought that it is something that every single person must have and acquire as the time went by.   But it isn’t so easy, this ability should be analyzed deeper because according to Brown (2003), there are2 primary hurdles in order to become successful readers:  first, they need to be able to master fundamental bottom – up   strategies for processing separate letters, words, and phrases,  as well as  top – down, conceptually driven to strategies for comprehension. Second, as part of that top – down approach, learners must develop appropriate content and formal schemata; it means background information and cultural experiences to carry out those interpretations effectively.

 The assessment of reading it’s not only assessment comprehension, as we could see below there are other aspects to take into consideration and they vary according to the types of readings, tasks or purposes. To sum up, this ability allows learners discriminate, recognize, infer, distinguish, identify not only in this skill but also with the other abilities. 

                                 Two relevant principles

At the moment we are going to assess our students we as teachers must be aware that the importance of the integration of skills is the paramount importance in language learning, as cited by brown (2003). When these skills are integrated, assessment is more authentic and provides more washback.

When students would be assessed it’s really important to set a contrast between student’s competence and student’s performance. Brown (2004) “When you propose to assess someone ´s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess one person’s competence, but you observe the person´s performance”. Sometimes the performance doesn´t indicate true competence: rest, illness or emotional distraction, text anxiety, a memory block or other reliability factors could affect student’s performance,  thereby providing an unreliable  measure of actual competence.

Brown (2003) cited two important principles:  the first one is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance; it means that you as a teacher have the obligation to consider at least two or (more performances) and/ or contexts before drawing conclusions.  Multiple measures will give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measure.

The second one is observable performance, it means being able to see or hear the performance of the learner, but in this case you are not going to observe the listening performance, what you are going to see is the results of the listening. The listening performance itself is the process of is the invisible, inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to ear and brain, so this product  is within  the structure of the brain.

A wrong concept

Nowadays many of the teachers that have been educating for years have a wrong concept of what evaluation and assessment is. They just think that both involve grades and mean the same thing but these concepts are more than grading students and deciding whether they should pass or not.

 Assessment is a continuous process that involves many aspects that affect student´s learning directly. Genesee & Upshur (1996) explains that assessment consists of three essential components; the first one is information that may be gathered through observation of students´ behavior in the classroom, by students´ comments during individual conferences or from entries in students´ journals. After gathering this information, the second component is interpretation, and the last one is decision making in order to decide what actions to take or what changes to make to instruction. 

 Talking about the last component of assessment, relevant aspects about educational decision making are the strategies used by the teacher at the moment students would be assessed. According to Brissenden and Slater, teachers should manipulate the kinds of learning that takes place, it means if they used assessment strategies that focus only on recall knowledge the result would be superficial learning, but if they choose assessment strategies that demand critical thinking or problem solving the result would be completely different, the level of students´ performance or achievement would be higher. To sum up assessment is a process that takes place everywhere and takes into account important factors that affect students a such as attitude, behavior, needs, learning style and strategies.