Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nevermindb]

I need help with assessing 10th grade ESL students. I've never assessed a student's ESL level before and my school doesn't have an assessment test (Yes, I know that's weird). Could someone help me with an assessment test or something?

[ddeubel]

Well this topic has been covered many times here but yes, unfortunately Dave's sucks when it comes to helping us categorize, tag or retain information.....

Here's what I wrote previously. Come to EFL Classroom 2.0 for the download of the rubrik, classlist and a nifty presentation to assess. Also, while you are assessing students, make sure you have work for them to do or your coteacher is handling things. http://eflclassroom.ning.com Search the topic, assessing speaking skills.

Jennifer,

This is fresh in my brain, just went through this at the orientation for new teachers.

I'd use my classlist rubrik and classlist. Have your coteacher write down all the students names. They should be familiar with the layout of this class list.

Basically, you are going to quickly assess them and score 1 - 4 . The quickest way is by vocabulary though this can sometimes be wrong. Higher level knowledge of vocab, higher speaking ability.

What I do is have the coteacher teach the class. Pull out the students by student number, 3 at a time. go through the basic questions.

!. How are you?
2. what is your name?
This relaxes them!
Then test the fundamentals, numbers in quick succession, days/months/time
3. Show them a picture. A familiar one is good, or one with lots of detail. I've just used the front cover of the textbook but for middleschool that isn't too good.

Ask and quiz for 1) present tense cont.
what is he/she/doing?
2) past What did he do?
3) future - What will he/she do?

Then ask what is it? what are they ? questions quickly. Start with basic vocab. ball/tree/bike and go to higher kite/bench/ducks Then give them a mark out of 4 based on the rubrik.

Call in the next three! Yeah, not the best and it is like a treadmill. But you'll get a good indicator who is a great speaker and who is at the low end and needs help....extremes.

David

[Easter Clark]

nevermindb--

You're not at a public school are you? In my experience, you could probably assess about 15 students per hour, and that's moving pretty fast. If time is limited, you could assign a group speaking task (they could have to decide on which movie to see, for example) and give high marks for leadership / participation. Individually is ideal, though; and there are plenty of rubrics (as dd mentioned) available online.

You just have to be sure what it is you want to measure--is it vocab and fluency, or accuracy and pronunciation--or all of them? One example that I have used is this:

Prepare a list of questions targeting the grammar / vocab you want to test--for example, if you want to test the future perfect progressive, ask "How long will you have been studying English this time next year?" for advanced students; for lower students, "What did you do yesterday" would suffice for the past tense and "daily routine" vocab.

Fluency: ___/4

Accuracy: ___ /4

Vocab: ___/4

Context: ___ /4

Pronunciation: ___/4

TOTAL: ___ /20

You also have to be sure that the test is identical for all students--don't be tempted to change things up if you get bored with the process!

[Paul_Zerzan]

Just listen to your heart.