UNIT 4 of portfolio

Unit 4

• Which assessment skills do you prefer?

Cristhian Cadena:

As teachers we know that assessing our students is part of our job, according to the students learning improvement.

One of the most important tools to assess our students is by testing once at the end of the month or unit, with this we can get all the problems or improvements they have according to the 4 skills or what, we are assessing in the unit. But we must be really careful with the evaluations of our students according through the formal tests, because it has some disadvantages, for example someone who has worked all year and presenting all his activities correctly, could failed the test, that might be for reasons of frustration or maybe he couldn’t study one day before the test.

But we can assess our students with other techniques like role plays and this will assess pronunciation, pair work and they can share writings like cards or notes and that could help in writing skill and fluency on writing.

So once at the end of the month a regular or short test, and some activities like the some that I mentioned before could help assessing our students.

Mariana Gutierrez:
As teachers, we have to be dealing with the process of our students, checking how they are going in the target language and where they have some troubles. That’s why we have to assess them, checking their progress in the four skills needed for the second language. For that, we can use different ways of testing them, so the students won’t feel frustrated or worried about their results; they need to feel that they can consult their teachers whenever they feel they need to do it. The tests applied for students need to be elaborated according to the level of knowledge that they have so they could answer them without a problem. Also before the test, teachers may want to spend extra time with students to clarify some topics, or just to give a feedback of their previous classes. Testing is not the only way to assess students; we can find different types of activities that also can show you the progress of each student. According to the reading of chapter 2, the skills that I prefer or I think would be very useful for students are reading and writing. They need to learn how to do it in the correct form. But of course the four skills are very important and students need to work equally with the four skills, giving a designated time to each one.

• Designing two items to assess two skills. test 4 (activity 2)

• Reflection
  
  We think that the most important aspect to be evaluated in this unit is Assessment skills when talking about language teaching. Basically what us as teachears really have to assess is our student’s progress in order to know and deal with their needs.