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.
Hi Paola!
ResponderEliminarI understand your point when you say that there were no real consciousness of the way we were assessing our students before. It happens to me too. Every time I learn a new way of assessing an specific skill, I immediately think about my students and how could I apply that task or activity with them, and whether or not it would be good.
On the other hand, I agree with the fact that reading, as any other skill, must be taken into account in a deeper way, that is, considering all aspects of it and the micro and macro skills that can be developed through the process.
I liked your entry! :)
What I've seen is that for most of us the tasks learnt in all the different presentations have made us to think deeply of our current ways of evaluation. It has been really useful to realize all the alternatives we have to give our students good assessment. Good entry Pao!
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