Unit 4: Choosing assessment

tasks
Assessment is a necessary part of any course which helps you understand your
students’ strengths and weaknesses, their progress and even their receptiveness to
learning.

Formal assessment

Some types of formal assessment are:

 Proficiency test (assesses overall language ability)

 Progress test (assesses how well the students have understood a unit or
section of a course)
 End-of-course test (assesses learning at the end of the programme)
 External examinations, such as IELTS Cambridge ESOL exams etc. (a form of
proficiency test which gives students a certificate of language ability)

Formal assessments need to include a variety of tasks so that all of the four language
skills are covered and because each kind of activity has its own pros and cons.

There is also the need to assess both passive and active language knowledge
(understanding and being able to produce).

A good test should be fair, appropriate and not too difficult to mark. Single-focus
tasks such as True/False/Don’t know and matching exercises are easy to mark
because the answers are either correct or incorrect.

Extended activities such as interview or writing tasks are best for assessing
productive skills but are slightly trickier to mark because they are subjective.

Match the following activity types below with their purpose shown in the table:

a. summary writing
b. sentence transformation
c. cloze test
d. re-ordering jumbled sentences

Activi
Example Purpose
ty
Complete the sentence so
that it means exactly the To test knowledge of
same: grammatical
1
'My brother lent me a pen' structures and relationships
'I borrowed a pen between language
from my brother'
To test grammatical
to want go Do the you park to?
2 knowledge,
Do you want to go to the park?
cohesion and collocation.
3 Read the novel extract and Test reading
write a synopsis for a comprehension,
 writing ability and a range of
young audience
language knowledge
Using a text with blanked out words, complete using To test knowledge of
only one word in each grammar
4
space. The missing words may or may not be provided in and lexis as well as reading
a word bank. comprehension

Unit 5: Course books and

reference materials
When choosing a course book for your class (if the school hasn’t already assigned
one) there are a number of factors to consider.

You need to think about who your students are and what they need. So, what should
you consider?

The basics such as age group and level are obvious, but it’s also important to think
about why that particular class are studying English. Is it for work? As a hobby? Are
they children being sent for extra lessons by their parents? And if so is this because
they struggle with English or because they want to get ahead? Are they planning to
travel or move to an English-speaking country? All of the above will influence what
type of course book you choose – it’s not just a ‘one-size-fits-all’ thing.

Another element to consider is whether your students will be taking a test at the end
of the course or not. Course books which prepare students for the IELTS exam are
very different to those aimed at students taking the FCE, for example. Or is there
simply an internal test to see if they can move up to the next level. Are all of the
students taking the exam or just a handful?

If the course does aim to get students ready for a particular exam then the
likelihood is that a general English course book will not be sufficient, you
need material which helps students not only get up to the right level for
the exam but one which also trains them in the techniques required for that
particular test.

Unit 6: Supplementary tasks &

materials

Supplementary materials can be anything from extra worksheets to DVDs, basically

anything we can use in addition to the course book.

As mentioned in the previous unit, some course books come with supplementary
materials in the teacher’s book which complement each lesson, but you may also
wish to use other sources to add a bit of variety. It’s all too easy just to follow the
course book exactly, but this can be quite unimaginative and may not always suit
your students’ needs.
You may also have a mixed ability class, so providing learners with slightly different
activities linked to the same language/theme/skill can make sure you provide the
right material for different students.

They can also be useful as back-ups for students who complete the assigned tasks
more quickly than others.

Can you think of any other reasons for using supplementary materials?

Unit 7: Teaching Aids

Teaching aids are the equipment and tools we use in the classroom. They can be
used to illustrate a point, reinforce a skill, relieve anxiety or boredom or help learners
memorise information. There are many different teaching aids available to us as EFL
teachers and these include, but are not limited to,

 CD players
 DVD players
 Puppets
 Interactive white boards
 Boards
 Computers
 Visual aids such as flash cards
 Games
 ‘Real-life’ materials such as menus
 Language laboratories where students can listen and record themselves
speaking

There are many different ways to use all of the teaching aids available to you but you
must think about the best ones to fulfil your specific objectives and suit your
students. For example, using puppets is a fantastic resource for teaching children but
may seem patronising to an adult class of business English learners – unless used
ironically perhaps!

Try to prepare any aids in advance and always check to make sure equipment works
before the lesson; there’s nothing worse than planning a listening skills lesson only to
find that the CD player is faulty.

Board

The board is an essential part of any classroom which allows you to write
grammatical structures and explanations as well as elicited vocabulary in a place that
all students can see easily. You can also build up ideas into diagrams as they crop up
and for team competitions (most students secretly love being given the opportunity
to write on the board, even adults!). Try to use different colours to highlight rules or
parts of speech and it can be an idea to divide the board into different sections e.g. a
space for grammar rules and model sentences and one for vocabulary.

Overhead projector

An overhead projector can be really useful for showing a worksheet to the class
rather than holding up a book or piece of paper and pointing to the sections you want
them to work on. If you prepare a completed handout with the correct answers
written this can also be a quick way of going through an exercise or piece of
homework. If you want students to only focus on one specific exercise, you can even
cover up sections and gradually uncover them as the lesson progresses. Aside from
this, the overhead projector also provides a great resource for groups to present their
work to the class.

CD and DVD player

Obviously CD players are essential for any listening exercise where students listen to
a dialogue and complete comprehension tasks. They can also be used to model
pronunciation though and even to listen for pleasure as a ‘Friday afternoon’ activity.
DVD players add a visual element and can therefore really help those learners with
visual memories. You can also do a variety of activities such as pausing the DVD and
predicting what happens next, watching without sound and getting the students to
guess what’s being said and even for playing a recording of the students themselves
in action.

Computer

Computers can be really useful for accessing the web and the various resources
available online. There are millions of interactive EFL exercises out there and so you
can easily find extra practice to add to any lesson, getting the students involved by
asking them to click on the correct answers themselves. The students can also join
English language forums and find an English-speaking penfriend to e-mail or chat
with. You can set projects for your students too, either at home or if you have a few
computers available in class. And you don’t necessarily need an Internet connection;
it can be as simple as typing a group story or making a poster.

Language Laboratory

Many schools have a language laboratory or self-access area where there are books,
computers, CDs etc. for students to use and where they can study by themselves.
This encourages autonomous learning and allows learners to choose the activities
they want to do. Language labs have listening and recording equipment that
students can use to practise speaking and pronunciation and assess their own
performance by listening back, promoting self-evaluation. You can also get them to
record speaking tasks done in class or for homework so that you can monitor their
performance and give individual feedback.

Flash cards

Flashcards can be used to present vocabulary along with a matching image so that
students are better able to remember it. They can also be useful for drilling
pronunciation or even grammatical structures. The idea is that they are ‘flashed’ up
quickly to elicit a quick response. For learning new vocabulary, the word is usually
displayed with the picture but you can then erase the word and only show the picture
(or have the word written on the back) to test what the students know.
Real-life materials

When teaching abroad it’s always a good idea to take some authentic material with
you from home. This could be newspaper articles, menus, maps, tourist information
about your home town or even bus/train timetables. These are known as ‘realia’ and
can make the learning experience much more authentic and memorable for our
students. It doesn’t necessarily need to be things from your home though, when
teaching food vocabulary you could take in different fruits and vegetables to
stimulate all the students’ senses and add an element of fun to the lesson. Realia can
even be used to tell a story, as part of a game or to form a dialogue.

Designing your own materials

1. Benefits of designing your own materials

1. Making them fit the context

Several criticisms of commercially made materials continue to be voiced, particularly

in relation to context. Here are the main criticisms:

 The coursebook and accompanying materials produced for the global EFL
market, including the EYL (English for Young Learners) market, are too
generic.
 They are not geared to specific groups of learners.
 They are not geared to any specific educational or cultural context.
 They contain functions and speech outputs based on situations that the
majority of foreign language learners will never be in.
 They are Anglo-centric in their construction and production and therefore do
not reflect any local varieties of English.

Thus, many teachers find it much, much better to make their own materials to make
them fit their own specific educational and cultural context.

2. Making them fit the individual learners

Commercially produced generic materials cannot address the needs of all the unique
individual learners in classrooms. But you can by:

 creating or adapting materials to the individual needs and learning styles of

students
 creating or adapting materials that take into account the learners’ first
language and the learners’ culture and personal experiences
 creating or adapting materials at the right level for particular learners, to
ensure the materials present an appropriate challenge and degree of success
 changing the often-repetitive model and organisation in the coursebook to add
more variety within the classroom to meet developing needs (e.g. using
whatever is appropriate to meet the goal – topics, situations, functions etc.)

3. Making them fit today’s events

Commercially produced materials cannot keep up to date with local and international
events. World and country changes can happen rapidly and learning materials need
to keep up with changes and events that are of special interest to learners in their
situation.

Only teachers on the ground can make the materials relevant to today’s world.

4. Lack of finance
Many schools may not have the budget to supply modern resources for the TEFL
classroom. Instead of moaning and groaning, most teachers step up to the plate and
design their own materials as a matter of course. The school and your learners will be
very appreciative of this.

Effective teacher-made materials

3. Effective teacher-made materials

Four effective forms of teacher-made materials/aids are worksheets, workcards,

flashcards and your own realia.

They can be used for oral practice in pairs or groups, or for listening, reading and
writing practice, with students working with other students or on their own.

Remember this: Many of the examples of worksheets on the internet are pretty
boring to look at. Usually, there is just a list of questions with spaces for the answer.
Try and make your materials a bit different and add in a picture or some colouring.

1. Your worksheets

 A worksheet is typically a Letter/A4 sized page (or two) of tasks.

 It is given out to individuals, pairs or groups, depending on the approach
required.
 Learners give their answers/responses on the worksheet.
 You circulate during the completion.
 You typically check the answers/responses with the whole class.
 Sometimes they are disposed of, sometimes the learners can keep them,
sometimes you’ll take them in to study progress, e.g. handwriting, or to
include them in the learners’ portfolios.
 Information gaps are See [Link] for
examples of a typical worksheet activity where learners work out missing and
different information that each have on their worksheet.

Here are three simple worksheets we have created for you, to demonstrate
that it doesn’t take long to construct them. We’ve used ready-made
pictures but you could just as easily draw or trace these, or ask some
artistic teacher or student to help you, if need be.

Example 1: Where is our butterfly?

Choose one word to fill the space: behind / above / below / beside
Example 2: Word game

(Note that we have scaffolded this activity, from easy to not so easy.)

I’ve made some small words from the letters in this big word:
What are they? Fill in the spaces.

1. Clue: it eats mice C__

2. Clue: water comes from this T__
3. Clue: you can get this from the doctor P__L
4. Clue: make a noise with your hands C___
5. Clue: not early ___E
6. Clue: a fruit _E__
7. Clue: the cost of something P___E
8. Clue: part of a flower P____

Example 3: The Gruffalo

(Note that this worksheet is based on an excellent storybook for young

learners.)

Put these sentences in order from 1-8. I’ve done number 1 for you.

__
Mouse: Here, by those rocks, and his favourite food is roasted Fox.
_
__
Fox: A gruffalo? What’s a gruffalo?
_
__
Mouse: It’s terribly kind of you, Fox, but No. I’m going to have lunch with a gruffalo.
_
__
Fox: Where are you meeting him?
_
Fox: Where are you going to, little brown mouse? Come and have lunch in my underground __
house? _
Mouse: He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws. __
 _
Story teller: A mouse took a walk through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the
1
mouse looked good.
__
Mouse: A gruffalo! Why didn’t you know?
_

Communication tasks

Gap-fill
Aside from the non-communicative gap-fill tasks (such as completing sentences with
the correct form of the infinitive verb in brackets e.g. If the photos ____ good, I’ll send
them to you. (be)), there are many which can be used to promote effective
communication. A good one is getting students into pairs and giving them the same
text but with different information missing from each. They then have to ask
questions to get the appropriate information from their partner to complete their
text.

There are many variations on this theme, including split crosswords, pictures with
different items missing from each, even timetables or schedules with different blank
spaces. You may have to monitor your students to make sure they don’t cheat
though!

Spot the difference

A great task for practising detailed descriptions is a picture difference task (done by
communication, not looking, of course!). In this activity, pairs are given the same
image with a few slight differences, or big ones depending on the level of your class,
and they have to find them. Imagine you are a student, how would you describe
image A to your partner?
Problem-based discussions
Problem-based discussions can be anything from ‘desert island scenarios’ to ranking
the importance of certain statements or ideas. In discussions such as these, the
teacher really just acts as a facilitator for the discussion, introducing the problem and
the language needed to work on it before putting students into small or larger
groups. You then need to go around the class observing and supporting, occasionally
joining a group to stimulate discussion if necessary. It’s important not to dictate
though, as you want students to address the problem for themselves.
This kind of task is particularly useful for practising ways of presenting personal
opinions, agreeing and disagreeing politely and compromising. Put the following
procedures for a problem-based discussion into the correct order:

What to correct
When deciding what exactly you should and shouldn’t correct, you need to think
about your lesson aims. Is the objective to work on a particular grammar point or is it
a skills lesson? If it’s the former, then yes, it can be constructive to correct your
students because you’re working on producing accuracy. However, if a student has
made a few errors whilst speaking, it’s not always necessary to correct every one.
Instead, you should focus on errors made which relate to the target language you’re
studying that lesson. Especially for lower level students who are naturally going to
make several errors, you don’t want to overwhelm them, certainly if those errors
relate to something they haven’t even studied yet! Otherwise your correction isn’t
particularly constructive.

For skills lessons (which focus on developing reading, writing, listening and speaking
proficiency), however, correction may not always be necessary. If the aim of the
lesson is to encourage fluency, then you jumping in to correct all the errors can really
hinder this and will actually work to obstruct your main goal of fluid spoken language.
Sometimes students just need to shake off their fear of speaking a foreign language
and a good way to do this can be to say, “okay for this exercise I just want you to
speak as naturally as possible, don’t worry about making mistakes, that’s not
important today, the aim is just to develop your fluency.” A lot of learners respond
really well to this, others may be a bit sceptical, but the important thing is to let
students know that exercises like these can be very useful (and that there’s a reason
why you’re not correcting them, not that their language was absolutely perfect and
they don’t need to improve at all!).

When to correct
As we’ve mentioned, for fluency exercises it can be really inappropriate to interrupt
students while they’re speaking by jumping in with corrections. There are ways of
correcting discreetly during conversation classes/exercises but we’ll look at those in
more detail in the next section. For speaking tasks, we can therefore decide to
correct at the end of the task, later on in the lesson or not at all (as in the example
above). If you decide to correct later then it’s important to use your listening skills to
note down any errors you overhear to discuss at a later stage or plan future tasks.

Choose an appropriate point to correct once the activity is over. With delayed
correction, though, you may want to make it anonymous so that students don’t feel
embarrassed in front of their classmates. There’s something about being singled out
directly in this way that is never pleasant! Aside from which, all students can always
benefit from more generalised error correction: just because it wasn’t them that
particular time isn’t to say that they never make that error.

For accuracy activities you may also want to correct afterwards or possibly on-the-
spot. This kind of immediate correction can be a bit trickier and you have to be more
careful so you don’t end up jumping on the student or slow down the pace of the
lesson too much. This requires you to be an active listener and there are various
techniques we can use to correct learner errors as we go along. Barnett also
suggests that by correcting in this way we can “give learners an experience of
partaking in meaningful dialogue” in order to inform and motivate them.

So once you’ve decided whether to correct or not and when exactly to do it, here are
a few different ways you can do it…

How to correct
There are several ways to correct errors as you go along but rather than saying
outright what the problem is, there are plenty of ways you can encourage student
self-correction. This can simply be through facial expressions; raised eyebrows, a
frown, a look of surprise perhaps to show the students that something is not quite
right. If they need more prompting you can repeat the sentence up to the error, for
example ‘you were waiting for a…?’ or perhaps a more direct question such as
‘tense?’ or ‘pronunciation?’

Other methods include repeating the sentence but placing stress on the problem
word, such as ‘last week you go to the cinema?’ or even saying directly ‘there’s an
error in that sentence’. Finger correction is also a useful technique which involves
holding up one hand and pointing to each finger with the other as you say each word
of the phrase. You can then hold on to the problem finger/word or skip a finger to
indicate a missing word.

If the student is unable to self-correct, though, we can use different types of

reformulating/recasting. This can be when we repeat a sentence but without drawing
the student’s attention to it directly, for example:

 Teacher “What did you do at the weekend?”

 Student “I go to the cinema with my friends”
 Teacher “Ah you went to the cinema, that’s nice. What did you see?”

We use this technique when we don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation or
discourage the student from continuing to speak. To make it slightly clearer that an
error has been made, however, you can recast the sentence more obviously, for
instance,

 Student “I’m not agree with Sara, I prefer skiing”

 Teacher “Oh, so you mean you don’t agree with Sara, you disagree with her.
Why do you prefer skiing?”

Even when using on-the-spot correction it’s a good idea to make a note of any
problems to review afterwards. Sometimes, when we correct students, they may still
make the same mistake time and again because they haven’t really absorbed the
correction. That’s why it is good if you can prompt them to self-correct because if
they learn for themselves they tend to remember better. Yet, there are ways of
drilling error correction even when it was given by you, the teacher. Once you’ve laid
the groundwork in the initial task, you can do some drilling of the correct form
afterwards:

 Teacher “Do you remember when you said ‘I’m not agree with Sara’? Yes?
What did I say instead?”
 Student “Erm, I don’t agree”
 Teacher “Good yes, who don’t you agree with”
 Student “Sara”
  Teacher “What about Sara, sorry?”
 Student “I don’t agree with her, with Sara”
 Teacher “Okay good, do you remember the other expression too? No? Okay
well just answer my questions. Do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No”
 Teacher “What’s the opposite of ‘agree’? We can add a prefix to change the
meaning.”
 Student “Oh yes, disagree”
 Teacher “So do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No, I disagree with her.”

When using delayed correction, on the other hand, some of the methods already
discussed can still be employed (i.e. finger correction, one word questions), but you
will obviously need to reintroduce the problem sentence. You could use examples of
errors the students made but unless several class members said very similar
incorrect sentences you may want to change the exact phrases to make them more
anonymous. Here, you could write the sentence on the board and ask the class to
identify the problem before eliciting the correction. Diagrams can help at this stage,
for example a line indicating past, present and future with an ‘x’ to mark ‘last
weekend’, showing that we can’t use “I go to the cinema with my friends” but instead
need the past form of the verb.

If your students have just learnt a grammar rule then sometimes all it takes is
repeating the rule and perhaps modelling an example sentence. Or for pronunciation
errors, you can indicate which syllable should be stressed “Japan” not “Japan”.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get students to self-correct pronunciation because you
automatically correct when you say the word! If your class is familiar with the
phonemic chart, however, you can indicate which sound they used and which one is
correct by pointing or drawing the symbol on the board.

Obviously any errors your students make in their writing have to be corrected
afterwards, but don’t be tempted to just give them everything on a plate; it is still
possible to encourage self-correction.

Look at this example of a student’s work and the symbols the teacher has written:

λ: I want tell you about my best friend. Her name is Christina and she
WO: has short blonde hair. Her favourite food is pasta but she hates
ag: salad. She go all the time to the cinema. Her favourite subject is
sp: history and her worst is fisics.

Spelling
Punctuation
Agreement
Word missing
Word order
Vocabulary
λ
WO
ag
sp
v
p
Check answer
 You could use a correction code like this and make a key at the beginning of the
course for your students to refer to. It will not only motivate them to discover and
correct their own errors but will save you time when marking.

So, before you jump in to correct a student’s error, think about the following things:

 is it appropriate to do so?
 is now the right time?
 can they self-correct with a bit of prompting?
 how can I correct without knocking their confidence? If you bear these things
in mind, hopefully your students will keep motivated and keep improving.