Assessment in CLIL

ASSESSMENT

 

In this post, I am writing about assessment because I think people (teachers, parents and children) are confused moderately about this term.

When I was a child, I was afraid when I had to do an exam because only I had traditions test in all my subjects. From my point of view, nowadays, there are several schools whose teachers only do this kind of assessment. As possible that teachers have a wrong concept about this term or teachers do not know to put it into practice.

For this reason, I would like to start this topic by the explanation of three similar terms, evaluation, assessment and testing, because these are often confused and used interchangeably.

•  Evaluation: it is the way that teachers can know if they are reaching the aims that they want to achieve. Some of the tools of the evaluation process can be observation, test, questionnaires, textbook and analysis.  
• Assessment: this type includes all the methods that teachers use to collect information about children’s knowledge, ability, attitudes and motivation. Teachers can use many different instruments as self or peer assessment and it can be formal or informal.
• Testing: it is a procedure that teacher can use to assess a child’s performance. Testing use tasks and assigns marks based on quantifiable results.

(Sophie Loannou-Georgiou & Pavlos Pavlou, 2003, Assessing young learners)

At first assessment can be a threatening word for teacher and above all for children. On the one hand, CLIL´s teachers have to assess of development’s children and it seems a quite difficult because they don´t know how can do it. On the other hand, children are afraid because always they have to do the same traditional test.

For this reason is really important that CLIL´s teachers know why and what have to assess to children. They have to know it because it is a necessary part in the process of teaching and learning and they should assess cognitive skills, attitudes, learning how to learn and behavioral and social skills.  (Sophie Loannou-Georgiou & Pavlos Pavlou, 2003, Assessing young learners)

Such as I have said before, is necessary that teachers know how have to do different kind of assessment. They have to be able to carry out assessment in a way for create positive atmosphere and attitudes towards English and learning in general. There are some methods for assess in this ways:

• Portfolio assessment.
• Structured assessment activities and tasks.
• Projects.
• Self-assessment.
• Peer-assessment.
• Traditional tests.
•  Learner-developed assessment tasks.
• Take - home tasks.
• Observation.
•  Conferencing.

(Sophie Loannou-Georgiou & Pavlos Pavlou, 2003, Assessing young learners)

Finally, I am going to focus on peer-assessment because I think learning and assessment can be more fun when it is done with your friends and they will be more motivated when they have to learn and work in classroom.  

Peer assessment “involves students taking responsibility for assessing the work of their peers against set assessment criteria” (University of reading (UK), http://www.reading.ac.uk/engageinassessment/peer-and-self-assessment/peer-assessment/eia-peer-assessment.aspx)

Thus, children can be engaged in give feedback to their peers, summative grades or a combination of the two. Besides this is a powerful way for your students to act as the 'assessor' and to have an opportunity to better understand assessment criteria. In this way, it can also transfer some ownership of the assessment process to them and thereby their motivation and engagement will increase. 

http://www.reading.ac.uk/engageinassessment/peer-and-self-assessment/peer-assessment/eia-peer-assessment.aspx

To conclude this post about assessment, I would like to emphasize on the importance to do correctly assessment because teachers have to carry through all these methods alternately for to achieve it. Also teacher can use the assessment to motivate children to learn because is possible that they aren´t able to recognize the usefulness of have acquired a foreign language in the future.

Now, I would like that you take a few minutes to think about assessment. What kind of assessment did you have when you were in Primary school?

What kind of assessment do teachers use in class nowadays? Are correct? 

References:

Bibliography:

 SOPHIE LOANNOU-GEORGIOU & PAVLOS PAVLOU, Assessing young learners. Resource books for teachers. Oxford.

Webgraphy:

University of reading (UK)

http://www.reading.ac.uk/engageinassessment/peer-and-self-assessment/peer-assessment/eia-peer-assessment.aspx

-          http://www.reading.ac.uk/#

Didáctica del Inglés aplicada a la Educación Primaria

READING SKILL

Now, I am going to focus on Reading because I think we waste a lot of time on reading different kind of texts and we aren’t aware of this, for examples, we usually read a book, magazine, newspaper, news and information on internet, even advertising and sign in the streets.

First of all, we have to know that reading is “the skill or activity of getting information from books” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online)but also, we can get information from other sources.

 Reading is one of the four skills that children have to develop in Primary School and teacher often observe that their students have comprehension problems and they wonder what the problem is and how the process of reading may work with their students. These problems can come from inappropriate method of development reading skills that children learn when they are in Primary School.

Reading is not the most difficult skill that children have to learn during their life. I think teachers have to develop this skill in different ways because there are several reading techniques depending on the purpose that we want to achieve.

In this way, we are going to focus on two different types of reading. These are oral reading (aloud) and Silent reading, each one of them have their own advantages and disadvantages for the development of reading skills depending on which is the goal.

On the one hand, traditionally oral reading (aloud) is the most popular type used in classes. Reading aloud is not the same as Silent reading because it is a different skill, and generally, it is not the one which most people have to utilize outside the classroom every day. Nevertheless, this reading aloud skill is a useful technique when used in these three situations:

• “Reading aloud to the teacher should be done individually or in small group” because this let teachers to ask students about meaning, what they think about what happen then… 
• “The teacher can use it as a means of training and checking rhythm and pronunciation” because teachers can read a sentence or phrase and then their students can repeat the same once or twice.
• “Reading dialogues aloud in pairs or small group is an efficient way of checking work” because students can help each other with words and pronunciation and also is a good way to give a feedback to your classmates.

The problem with this type of reading is that teachers use to do it every day in all classes, and also they do it for achieve aims that should be achieve through Silent reading, because it is the appropriate way, so they do not usually make use of reading aloud.  (Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children)

On the other hand, Silent reading can be the most useful type of reading, because normally people will use it and it remains for the rest of their lives. Therefore, teachers should develop this type of reading since early years, and in this way, children will enjoy the wonderful world of reading. (Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children)

So that children can get to the end of this way, teachers should know which activity develop each technique. Thus, I would like to show you the most important techniques that teachers should work with their students through different activities.

• Skimming: “reading a passage quickly to grasp the main idea”.
• Scanning: “reading a passage quickly to find specific information”.
• Contextual guessing: “making guesses about the meaning of words by looking at the surrounding words or situation”.
• Paraphrasing: “the ability to say or write ideas in other words; measures the reader´s understanding of the main idea of a text”.
• Scrambled stories: “also known as “jigsaw reading”: the reader re- orders the mixed up pieces of a text to show he understands how a texts fits together”.
• Intensive reading: “reading between the lines; the reader understands what is meant but not started in a passage”.
• Extensive reading: “reading widely in order to improve reading comprehension, reading speed and vocabulary”.
• Making inferences: “reading between the lines,: the reader understands what is meant but not stated in a passage”
• Information transfer: “exercise which requires readers to transfer information from the text into another form or related text or drawing”.

(Tanner, K and Catherine Green, Tasks for Teacher Education a Reflective Approach, 1998)

Such as I have said before, all these techniques have to develop through different activities year after year. Besides it would be very interesting if these techniques are made alternately, for example teacher can alternate different techniques and not only develop one technique, although children do different activities.

To conclude this post about reading, I would like to emphasize some aspect of three important items. The first one is about oral reading (aloud) and Silent reading; I think good teachers have to develop reading skill through the use of both of them, and also they have to be able to use them alternately depending on the goal that they want to achieve. The second one is about different techniques that good teachers have to be able to use alternately with different kind of activities. And the last one is about the importance of develop correctly the reading skill because from my point of view, we are continuously using this skill though we are not conscious of this.

REFERENCES

Cambridge Dictionaries Online

• http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Tanner, K and Catherine Green, Tasks for Teacher Education a Reflective Approach, 1998

Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children

M for ...

M for MOTIVATION 

 

Now, I am going to focus on the Word motivation, because I think this word have to be present every day in our life.

The word motivation comes from the Latin verb “movere” and this meaning “to move”, so I wonder, what encourage people to do something? 

A definition for Motivation could be “concerns the direction and magnitude of human behavior” (Teaching and Researching Motivation, 2011, pg. 4). This explain why people make a choice to do something, how long people decide to carry on with their own decisions and how many effort they expend on it. (Teaching and Researching Motivation, 2011).

When you think about motivation is very important to take into account two different types of it:

-          - Intrinsic motivationà that is, when people do something because they feel pleasure and personal satisfaction with it. Also it could be about enjoyment, interest, challenge and knowledge development.

With this kind of motivation people encourage spontaneous learning behavior and it might be the most effective way to learn or to know something. (Lessons from Good Language Learners, 2008).

-         - Extrinsic motivation à that is, when people try to do something for achieve another thing like getting a job or a good mark, avoiding a punishment… Thus, we can considerer that it might be relate to extrinsic rewards (Lessons from Good Language Learners, 2008).

Nevertheless, we can say that there is one more type; it is called “Amotivation”. This happens when people have to shortages of any kind of motivation (Teaching and Researching Motivation, 2011).

When we think about this topic we have to be careful, because is very common to confuse and connect motivation with “fun” or “boredom”. In this way, we could consider motivation as a synonym of fun and an antonym of boredom.

On the other hand, we should be in contact with good learning, personal satisfying and go after challenge (Lessons from Good Language Learners, 2008).

In which contexts could we find motivation? There are lots of contexts where we could find this aspect in real life. I dare to say motivation works day to day for different daily routines like going to school, doing homework, playing, meeting with your friends and even to live.

Because of this, I think is essential in Primary School classes and we have to focus on it in second languages subjects.

In Spain there are a lot of Bilingual schools and in many cases children don’t know why they have to study this subject and they don´t want to do it. But, what is the problem? Why children don’t want to study this if it is the best for their future?

Maybe teachers aren´t enough prepared to teach in this way and their students end up without desire to learn and probably with rejection to the new knowledge.

Thus, I think if teachers were more motivated to teach their students would be more motivated to learn.

To sum up, I would like to emphasize the importance of including motivation in our life and our class. It is essential for people and students to look forward to learn, if not the teacher has to generate this motivation because it would make easier the learning process.  

REFERENCES:

Books:

  -       Griffith, c. 2008, Lessons from Good Language Learners 2008. Cambridge University Press.

  -   Zoltán Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda, 2011, Teaching and Researching Motivation. Applied Linguistics in Action Series.