Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Yini Chen
educators to evaluate, measure and record students' academic preparation, learning progress, skill
assessment include practicality, reliability, validity and authenticity. In my opinion, this is also
teaching target was students in a Chinese public elementary school. At that time, most public
elementary schools in China were inclined to use traditional assessment. Thus, I only chose to
use traditional assessment at first. For example, I used some exercises with select-response
format to check whether the students have mastered certain language knowledge or skills that
they learned in the class. After a period of observation, I found that although this traditional
testing method can indeed identify the students' weakness, it sometimes lacks authenticity and
practicality. The students could remember some specific sentence patterns or grammatical
structures, but it is difficult to apply the learned sentence patterns or grammatical structures to
the actual English conversation. The students were passive throughout the language learning
process.
The alternative assessment means the process of learning is active, emphasizes the process and
product. In addition, alternative assessment takes learning as a collaborative process. Thus, after
completed the teaching of a unit, I would randomly arrange different topics (the topics were
associated with a particular unit) for each the student and asked them to complete a personal
presentation according to their topic. As my students were all elementary school students, I
usually provide some reference materials or preparation plans for the students before letting them
prepare their presentations independently. I played the role of an assistant in the whole
preparation process, but I didn’t interfere with students' choices. In the process of presentation, I
made assessment on the students' performance (such as oral skilling, the understanding of the
knowledge etc). My evaluation criteria were all based on the standards of the elementary school
syllabus at that time, and the performance of students' autonomous learning ability in the
preparation process also be counted as part of the final score. After all students finished their
presentations, I divided them into several groups for self-assessment and peer assessment. The
most students were more active than before in the test activities, and they were brave enough to
share their assessment for themselves and their team members. The students have gained more
useful assessment in such activities and have improved their speaking skills.
work. Traditional assessment can help me to have a more systematic and direct understanding of
the students’ learning situation. For example, I can use specific data to figure out the
grammatical structure or vocabulary usage with the highest error rate among students and help
In a nutshell, alternative assessment is a more effective way for me; however, traditional
Abeywickrama, P., & Brown, H. D. (2010). Language assessment: Principles and classroom