2

Purposes for
assessment

TC Task 2.1

Here are some reasons for giving language assessments. In each

case . . .
Who would need the information?
What would be the best way to find the information? Is an assessment really
needed?

1 How long is it likely to take this person to learn to speak Portuguese at

an advanced level?
2 What sounds does this learner find it most difficult to produce?
3 Is this learner going to benefit more from an elementary or an
intermediate-level language class?
4 Has this student learnt enough to progress to studying at the next
level?
5 Has this student learnt the definitions of the 20 words I  assigned as
homework?
6 Does this person speak Chinese well enough to be able to work effec-
tively with Chinese colleagues at our office in Beijing?
7 Will this student be able to write effective essays in English when she
studies at an Australian university?
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8 Has this learner reached a high enough level in Italian for us to award
him an intermediate-level certificate?

What other kinds of reasons for using assessments can you add to
this list?
Read the following section on ‘Purposes for assessment.’ Which purpose or
purposes are involved in each situation?

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
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 Purposes for assessment  13
Purposes for assessment
People most often use language assessments to collect two kinds of data.
One relates to the learning of languages, with assessing the degree of pro-
gress towards a learning goal. These purposes are important in schools and
other educational settings and so the assessments used to collect the data
come under the heading of educational assessment.
Educational language assessment usually takes place within language
programmes. The procedures are usually based on content that has been
(or will be) taught; are frequently developed and carried out by teachers;
and can often be flexible, allowing for the use of observational techniques
(watching and recording what learners do), portfolios (collections of learn-
ers’ work), self-assessment (learners making judgements about their own
abilities) and informal tests or quizzes, as well as formal tests administered
under more strictly controlled conditions.
The second kind of information is connected with whether or not a
person’s language ability is adequate to satisfy some predetermined need
or standard. This is known as proficiency assessment. The assessment of
language proficiency is usually connected to the language and related skills
that are needed to carry out a job, study an academic subject or fulfil other
kinds of roles. Because the focus is not on what the assessee has been
taught, this kind of assessment is less likely to be carried out by teachers
and more likely to involve formal tests administered under controlled, uni-
form, standardised conditions and produced by national or international
agencies.
Proficiency assessments are distinct from educational assessments because
they do not centre on learning processes or the outcomes of a particular
course of study. Proficiency assessments are connected with a person’s cur-
rent functionality rather than with their learning: what the assessee can
accomplish through their use of language now, not how they reached this
point, or how long it might take them to arrive at a higher level of ability. In
proficiency assessments the issue is whether or not the person being assessed
has sufficient language ability to satisfy certain needs.
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Proficiency assessments are often used for gate-keeping decisions: immi-

gration, access to employment and educational opportunities. These may
relate to a relatively specific purpose – such as using the language in lead-
ing groups of tourists around a city, working as a dentist, steering ships in
international waters or studying marketing at a university – or it may be for
less specialised or less clearly definable general purposes that might apply to
a very wide range of language users. Tasks that many language users might
need to carry out at some point might include reserving a room in a hotel or
guest house, filling in forms with basic personal information, buying food,
following television news programmes, reading articles in popular maga-
zines or holding conversations about personal experiences.

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6450696.
Created from nottingham on 2022-05-07 18:20:11.
 14  Part I
Educational assessment in teaching and learning
Assessment can take place at different stages during the learning process.
Before they begin a course in a new language, we may be interested in the
learners’ aptitude for language learning: their potential to learn. Although
we know that almost anyone can learn a foreign language, given the time
and motivation, some people may be predisposed to make faster progress
than others.
A sports coach looking for someone with the potential to be a good bas-
ketball player may try to find someone who is tall and able to jump high,
with quick reactions, good coordination and a competitive spirit. In the same
way, some selective language training programmes, such as those organised
by the military, need to pick from a large group of applicants those with
the greatest potential to learn a language quickly. The Pimsleur Language
Aptitude Battery (Pimsleur, Reed, & Stansfield, 2004), for example, set out
to identify as potential language learners individuals with a good memory
for word shapes and sounds who are good at discriminating between similar
sounds, good at identifying grammatical patterns, and who have an interest
in other cultures.
Partly because motivation is now widely regarded as more important
than aptitude in shaping language learning success and partly because most
language courses cater for learners who already have some knowledge of
a language, aptitude tests are not as widely used as they used to be. It is
more often the case that course providers wish to find out how much of the
content of the course language learners already know before they begin,
or how much they have learnt by the end. In this case, assessments may be
prognostic – looking forward to the content planned for the course and
deciding on priorities – or concerned with achievement – looking back to
what the learners have been taught to find out how much they have absorbed
and what might need to be covered again.
Aptitude and prognostic assessments are used to inform selection
decisions – deciding which learners might require language courses or choos-
ing those most likely to succeed. They may also be used to inform placement
decisions: decisions about which of the available classes best matches each
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

learner’s needs. During a course, achievement assessments (as progress tests)

might be used to gauge the ongoing improvement made by learners. At the
end of a course (as exit tests), they are often used in making pass/fail deci-
sions or in assigning grades. In using achievement assessments, the teacher
may be interested in obtaining detailed diagnostic information about which
parts of the material the learners have taken in and which parts will need
more work.
In assessing learning, a distinction is often made between more forma-
tive uses of assessment that immediately guide what teachers and learners
will do next and more summative uses, which focus on a retrospective

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6450696.
Created from nottingham on 2022-05-07 18:20:11.
 Purposes for assessment  15
picture of what has been learnt. Another way of expressing this distinc-
tion is to call the former assessment for learning and to contrast this
with assessment of learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998). In other words, in
Wiggins’ (1998) terms, summative assessment audits learning; formative
assessment informs it.
An example of the use of formative (and diagnostic) assessment would be
a teacher observing that some students are having difficulty in distinguish-
ing between for and since when talking about time in English. The teacher
might decide to intervene by asking questions and providing examples to
help build their understanding of the distinction. This kind of assessment
informs learning because the teacher is able to adjust the content of her
classes to take account of the students’ performance. The focus is on what
should happen next in the classroom to bring about learning.

Task 2.2 TC

Look at this extract from a job advertisement placed by the British govern-
ment. What kind of language assessment do you think they might use in
selecting suitable people for the job?

You won’t need any specific language skills for a career in the Foreign
Office, although they’ll certainly be an advantage in your career. Where
an overseas position requires language skills you’ll receive intensive
tuition to get you up to the right level. So if you need to speak fluent
Russian for a press and public affairs role in the British Embassy, Mos-
cow, we’ll make sure that the full-time language training is in place for
you.

An example of a more summative assessment would be an end-of-year test

based on the topics taught during the year. The test audits learning by pro-
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

viding evidence of what the students have learnt and how well they have met
the course objectives. The focus is on finding out how much learning has
happened. Like the formative assessment described previously, such a test
might include questions dealing with specific points of grammar, such as the
for/since distinction found in the diagnostic test; but the results may not be
available until the school year has finished and there is no immediate oppor-
tunity to work on improving performance as all the students have left. In
this case, the results might be used for programme evaluation or judgements
about the effectiveness of the language course rather than on the abilities of
individual learners.

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6450696.
Created from nottingham on 2022-05-07 18:20:11.
 16  Part I
Assessment and learner motivation
Gaining an awareness of how well the learners are progressing is, of course,
easiest when the learners are also involved and interested in the process and
share their insights with their teacher. Good learners are self-regulated: they
set themselves targets, think about how best to learn (trying out and evalu-
ating new techniques), and often reflect on their own progress towards their
goals. Self-assessment and peer assessment (in which learners assess their
own and each other’s performance) have emerged as powerful means of
engaging learners in these processes and helping them to take more control
of their own learning.
Of course, teaching can become more challenging when the learners do
not want to learn or are unwilling to communicate. This brings us to another
reason for using assessment: motivating learners. Because assessments are
often associated with rewards – access to opportunities such as courses or
jobs, prizes, certificates, grades, praise and attention from the teacher – they
can serve as a powerful motivation for learners. However, using assessment
in this way is risky and potentially very damaging. In some cases, it can even
have a negative effect on a learner’s motivation. The learner who repeatedly
fails to gain good grades or pass tests will sooner or later become frustrated,
conclude that language learning is not worth the effort and give up even
trying to learn.
Formative diagnostic assessment, by providing helpful feedback (using
information about performance to help learners to improve), promises to
guide learners in their studies. However, for many learners, especially those
in formal schooling, success on tests, especially major proficiency tests, may
come to seem more important than successful communication in the lan-
guage they are learning. Where this happens, the content of the test can take
over from the official curriculum and learning goals that are not covered on
the test may get pushed aside and ignored. Teachers may teach and students
may try to learn only the material that they think will be assessed. The
changes in teaching and learning that may come about in response to an
upcoming test are known as washback, and this has emerged as an impor-
tant area of language assessment research. Feedback and washback are dis-
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

cussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

Different worlds or shared spaces?

Educational assessment, on the one hand (particularly formative assess-
ment), and proficiency assessment, on the other, are often seen as distinct,
even incompatible areas of specialization, conducted by different people
employing different techniques, informed by different theories and embrac-
ing different values. For this reason, they are often treated separately and
the relationship between them ranges from mutual indifference to some-
times heated conflict. This conflict is most often played out in the field of

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6450696.
Created from nottingham on 2022-05-07 18:20:11.
 Purposes for assessment  17
summative assessment where the role of the teacher as the facilitator of
learning (the world of formative assessment) comes up against the need to
account for what has been learnt in terms of the general standards set by
employers, governments or other external agencies (the worlds of summa-
tive assessment and proficiency assessment).
Although the differences between what teachers do in the classroom
and large-scale testing are important, there is also a good deal in com-
mon between them. To be effective, both depend above all on well-crafted
questions or other techniques that will provide useful evidence of learners’
abilities. Task types used in large-scale tests can be adapted for use in the
classroom while innovative ideas first tried out in class can find their way
into more formal assessments. Both classroom assessments and large-scale
tests can be improved by careful and critical review and through experience.
The results from an assessment given on one occasion inevitably point to
improvements to be made the next time it is used. Achieving good quality in
both requires collective and systematic effort. Ways of checking and improv-
ing language assessments are described in Chapters 3 and 4.
Perhaps the strongest argument for treating assessment in the classroom
and in the examination hall in the same book is that in a healthy educational
system, both should work together. If teachers understand how tests work,
they will be more effective at preparing their students to take examinations.
On the other hand, as Alderson (1999) remarked, testing is too important
to be left to testers. It is essential that educational tests should reflect the
curriculum and the needs and interests of learners. Teachers are familiar
with their learners and with the reality of how the curriculum is delivered in
practice. They are therefore well placed to judge the content of tests and to
hold the test makers to account.
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Green, Anthony. Exploring Language Assessment and Testing : Language in Action, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6450696.
Created from nottingham on 2022-05-07 18:20:11.