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.