Experience initiative theme: Two issues in assessment of high school student performance in english

THANH HOA Department of Education and Training
TRAN PHU High School
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EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE
THEME: Two Issues in Assessment of High School Student Performance in English
Researcher: Dau Thi Diep
Foreign Language Group
Tran Phu High School
 THANH HOA MAY 2016
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Problem Area in Assessment
A Review of Relevant Literature
B1) Assessing Grammar Knowledge
B2) Assessing Oral Skills
Recommendations for The Current Case
Conclusion
References
Introduction 
The issues of teaching English have widely discussed and researched since English now becomes an international tool for communicating among people around the world, even among people in the same community. Individuals with a variety of professionals, age, ethnics and purposes try hard not only to achieve a certain level of but also to get a required certificate of English. In other words, “language tests play a powerful role in many people’s lives, acting as gateways at important transitional moments in education, in employment, and in moving from one country to another” (McNamara, 2000, p.4). Hence, the issues of testing one’s ability of English have attracted great attention of language experts. From the point of view of an English educator, the author of this paper aims to discuss two issues in assessment of high school student performance in English, specifically which of the twelfth grade students. Then, in an attempt to find best solutions to the involving case, the author reviews relevant literature, comparing various possible answers. The last part of this paper is devoted to identifying the most suitable solution to the two mentioned problems, detailing specific recommendations. 
A) Problem Area in Assessment
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As you can find a typical test attached with this paper, tests during the twelfth school year, even in other school years, are mainly aimed to measure students’ ability of grammar. However, the required level of grammar is quite high. It is obviously that exceptions of grammar rules are tested for often. One can claim that such a high level is unnecessary and causes many problems for students and relevant educators as well. Learners and teachers spend a lot of valuable time practicing all that grammar stuff even though it is clear to them that what they are struggling for is hardly ever applied in communication. Making students pay much attention to grammar also affects their later process of learning English. They certainly become less fluent, even less confident once they are too conscious of grammar rules. This negative effect is obviously shown in reality as at the end of a seven-year high school course students are rarely able to communicate in ordinary conversations in English.
The lack of balance of measurement among four macro skills is another problem area in assessment that this paper aims to cover. Oral and aural skills are completely neglected during the period of seven years of learning English at high school. Therefore, no one can find even a single part which is devoted to testing speaking or listening skills in any out of twelve tests in the twelfth grade. Meanwhile, speaking ability is a very key indicator of one’s English competence. Also, listening skill receives very little attention. Hence, one can claim that measuring listening and speaking skills is absent from the assessment of student performance. Practicing all four skills in English is officially required in almost English courses in high school so it is necessary that aural and oral skills receive much more attention in language testing.
B) A Review of Relevant Literature
B1) Assessing grammar knowledge 
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Penny Ur (1996, p.75) over-simply defines grammar as “the way words are put together to make correct sentences”. However, one can “apply the term ‘grammatical’ to units smaller than sentences” (Ur, 1996, p.75) as grammar is “the rules in a language for changing the form of the words and joining them into sentences” according to Oxford advanced learners’ dictionary, seventh edition. Grammatical competence “will be understood to include knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics and phonology” (McNamara, 2000, p.93). The question on the adequate level of grammar which should be achieved by high school students has been an issue of debate for many years. Some argue that the superficial knowledge of grammar can make no significant contribution towards achieving the communicative aim. Hence, there is no point in setting the target grammatical level for high school students unnecessarily high. In contrast, one may fear that “a lack of grammatical knowledge can severely limit what is understood or produced in communication” (Purpura, 2004, p.4). In reality, each educational institution requires a certain grammatical level of their learners. Thus, it is the teacher’s responsibility for guiding students to acquire the grammar necessary and to meet the grammatical requirement of that teaching situation. High school students in this case demonstrate their grammar ability only through language tests designed by their own teachers. Arthur Hughes (2003) has stated that all we would be looking for is some general indication of the adequacy of the student’s grammar knowledge so “the test should be guide do-able; not too difficult” (Ur, 1996, p.42). Moreover, the grammar part of the test must provide more context than only single sentences. Unfortunately, the achievement test discussed here uses a list of single sentences to check the grammar knowledge. Besides traditional tests, there are a variety of alternative assessments like class observation, portfolio or class activities which can be applied for the author’s teaching situation. These alternative ones require students to be able to produce grammatical responses and apply grammar to some communicative purpose (Purpura, 2004, p.2). In other words, assessments of grammar should require students to demonstrate not only their memory capacity of grammar forms but also their language ability of understanding and applying them.
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B2) Assessing oral skills
4
Hughes (2003) believes that language abilities are not easy to measure and it has been widely recognized that speaking is the most difficult skill to assess. It is absolutely true to the author’s teaching situation. In reviewing earlier work, this paper concludes that testing speaking skill consists of the testing of pronunciation, spoken grammar, spoken vocabulary, and even sociolinguistic applications of speech. Hughes (2003) claims that the most common format for assessing speaking ability is the interview. Besides, interaction with fellow candidates and responses to audio- or video-recordings are also widely applied for testing oral skills. However, “a frequent problem for teachers is when there are so many learners in one class that it seems to make it unrealistic to assess speaking” (Scrivener). The teachers who designed the discussed test are also in that situation. Their class size generally ranges from thirty to fifty and each class lasts forty-five minutes per time so it is unlikely possible to assess all students’ performance at a time. In this case, this assessment should be done through classroom activities, group presentations during class periods of the school year. An underlying problem in testing speaking in this educational case is its scorer reliability. As Mead and Rubin (1985) confirm that “a major aspect of any rating system is rater objectivity: Is the rater applying the scoring criteria accurately and consistently to all students across time? The reliability of raters should be established during their training and checked during administration or scoring of the assessment”. In some cases, it would be more reliable if students’ performance is double rated. Not only marking learners’ performance but the teacher should provide them with a grid containing a list of specific criteria with comments. As Hughes (2003) concludes that the accurate measurement of oral ability is not easy and it takes considerable time and effort, including training, to obtain valid and reliable results.
C) Recommendations for the current case
It cannot be denied that grammar contributes an essential part to one’s linguistic competence. However, the too much emphasis on the mastery of grammatical structures may decreases students’ fluency. Thus, under the discussed circumstance, the test designers should aim to a lower level of grammar which is widely considered an adequate level for high school students. Specifically, exceptions of grammar rules need to be tested with care and are used only to distinguish outstanding individuals rather than to check ordinary students’ grammar ability. One more thing to make this test authentic is that texts for checking grammar ability should not be in isolated sentences but in a specific context. The teachers in charge of designing tests should be in an emphasis on grammar meaning rather than on accuracy of form. Therefore, the answer to the question whether grammar tests that focus only on sentence level accuracy can be justified (Rea-Dickins, 2001) is absolutely no. Moreover, the format for measuring students’ control of grammar should be varied. It can be separately tested with multiple-choice questions, matching or sentence transformation, etc. at a time and through writing tasks at other time, for example. In short, more effort and investment should be put into designing tests, especially into the grammar part. 
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In regard to speaking and listening skills, it is strongly advisable to include their measurement sessions among tests, at least in one test, during the school year because “the motivating power of tests appears clear: learners who know they are going to be tested on specific material next week will normally be more motivated to study it carefully than if they had simply been told to learn it” (Ur, 1996, p.279). Under the author’s educational situation, teachers may encounter difficulties in measuring these skills but it is worth great effort to manage them. The author of this paper is in favor of covering the measurement of the oral skill through class activities and observation such as pair work, group work or group discussion. In terms of the aural skills, they can be included in a fifteen-minute test. At the early stage of the semester, students should be noticed that their speaking and listening skills will be assessed during the class time and the criteria that the teacher would focus on. Moreover, the teachers should give their learners comments on their oral performance in parallel with a specific score after the testing progress comes to end. In short, although speaking ability is the most difficult one to measure, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
Conclusion
In this paper, the author has identified two issues in assessment relevant to her own teaching situation, reviewing related literature and finally detailing specific recommendations. It should be repeatedly noticed that grammar tests should be guide do-able; not too difficult and testing speaking and listening skills at least once during the school year is essentially done. Also, various alternative assessment ways which are more effective than the traditional tests are already presented in the paper. It would be ideal if teachers could combine those assessing methods. The testing issue obviously plays a vital part in test-takers’ learning process, especially in which of high school students. Thus it is vital that test designers are aware of making assessing student performance more valid and reliable.6
References:
Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching. England: Pearson Education Limited. 
Hughes, A. (2003). Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mead, Nancy A. & Rubin, Donald L. (1985). Assessing Listening and Speaking Skills. Eric Digest. Retrieved 26 May 2011, from 
McNamara, T. (2000). Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Purpura, J. E. (2004). Assessing Grammar. In Anderson, J. C. & Bachman, L. F. (Eds.), Cambridge Language Assessment series. Cambridge University Press.
Rea-Dickins, P. (2001). Fossilization or evolution: The Case of Grammar Testing. In Elder, C., Brown, A., Grove, E., Hill, K.  O’Loughlin, K. (Eds.), Studies in Language Testing 11: Experimenting with Uncertainty: Essays in Honour of Alan Davies (pp. 22-32). Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.
Scrivener, J. One Stop English: Skills: Assessing Speaking Skills. Retrieved 26 May 2011, from 
Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SỞ GD & ĐT THANH HOA
 THPT TRAN PHU	KIỂM TRA HỌC KỲ II LỚP 12, NĂM HỌC 2015-2016
 	Môn: ANH VĂN
 	 Thời gian làm bài: 90 phút, không kể thời gian giao đề
Mã đề thi AV102
 	 (Đề thi có 06 trang) 
Họ, tên thí sinh: 
Số báo danh: .
PHẦN TRẮC NGHIỆM: TỪ QUESTION 1 ĐẾN QUESTION 64 ( 8 điểm )
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions from 1 to 25.
Question 1: A: “ Do you have copy of The Last Leaf ?”
 B: “ You are .. luck. I have just one copy left.”
A. by B. in C. of D. at
Question 2: Since the flood the number of homeless people..dramatically.
A. are increasing B. had increased C. increase D. has increased 
Question 3: Can you make yourself. In French ?
A. understood B. understand C. to understand D. understanding
Question 4: Today many species of plant and animal are in.. of extinction.
A. danger 	 B. endangered C. endanger D. dangerous
Question 5: If your current rate of deforestation continues, the world’s rainforests..within 100 years.
A. would vanish B. vanish C. will vanish D. would have vanished
 Question 6: At first she was trained to be.scriptwriter, but later she worked as..secretary.
A. the/a B. a/a C. the/the D. a/the
 Question 7: “ Don’t look so worried! You should take the leader’s comment with”
A. a teaspoon of salt B. a cup of salt C. a dose of salt D. a pinch of salt
Question 8: If Ian astronaut traveling in a cabin, I’d not be annoyed by the weightlessness.
A. am B. be C. will be D. were
Question 9: Our project was successful..its practicality.
A. in terms of B. with a view to C. regardless D. on behalf of
Question 10: Of the two new students, one is friendly and.
A. the others are not B. the other is not 
C. another is un friendly D.other lacks friendliness
Question 11: There is one person toT owe more than I can say.
A. whom B. who C. that D. whose
Question 12: After a good night’s sleep I woke up feeling as fresh as.. and eager to start a new day.
A. a fruit B. a daisy C. a flower D. a maiden
Question 13: Mary is sixteen years old. She is.. young to get married.
A. too B. so C. such D. enough
Question 14:  is the existence of a large number of different kinds of animals and plants which make a balanced environment.
A. Extinction B. Biodiversity C. Habitat D. Conservation
Question 15: Since we.to working so hard, can we rest for a while?
A. don’t used B. aren’t used C. don’t use D. not use
Question 16: - Kate: “ How lovely your cats are!” - David: “.”
A. Really? They are B. Thank you, it is nice of you to say so C. Can you say it again? D. I love them, too.
Question 17: Peter was ejected after committing five personal. In water sport game yesterday.
A. mistakes B. faults C. fouls D. errors
Question 18: Toxic chemicals in the air and land have driven many species to the..of extinction.
A. tip B. edge C. verge D. border
Question 19: She ranan interesting article about fashion while she was reading the newspaper.
A. after B. cross C. away D. out
Question 20: It’s essential that every student. All the lectures.
A. attends B. attend C. has attended D. attended
Question 21: It’s secret. Youlet anyone know about it.
A. mustn’t B. needn’t C. mightn’t D. may not
Question 22: When Tet holiday comes, Vietnamese people often feel inclined to. Their houses.
A. do up B. do in C. do through D. do over
Question 23: - Anne: “ Make youself at home” - John: “ ..”
A. Thanks! Same to you B. That’s very kind. Thank you
C. Not at all. Don’t mention it D. Yes, can I help you?
Question 24: He managed to keep his job.the manager had threatened to sack him.
A. therefore B. although C. unless D. despite
Question 25: It was announced that neither the passengers nor the driverin the crash.
A. are injured B. was injured C. were injured D. have been injured
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word that differs from pronunciation in each of the following questions from 26 to 27.
Question 26: A. leaves B. brings C. looks D. plays
Question 27: A. watched B. promoted C. invited D. decided
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress in each of the following questions from 28 to 30.
Question 28: A. require B. consist C. achieve 	 D. system
Question 29: A. intervention B. necessary C. intellectual D. productivity
Question 30: A. intensity B. accurate C. erosion D. miraculous
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word or phrase that is CLOSEST in meaning to the underlined part in each of the following questions from 31 to 32.
Question 31: We went away on holiday last week, but it rained day in day out.
A. every single day 	B. every other day 
 C. every second day 	 D. every two days
Question 32: We can use either verbal or non-verbal forms of communication.
A. using gesture 	B. using speech 
C. using verbs 	 D. using facial expressions
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word or phrase that is OPPOSITE in meaning to the underlined part in each of the following questions from 33 to 34.
Question 33: Thousands are going starving because of the failure of this year’s harvest.
A. hungry B. rich C. poor D. full
Question 34: There is growing concern about the way man has destroyed the environment.
A. ease B. attraction C. consideration D. speculation
Mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to show the underlined part that needs correction from 35 to 39.
Question 35: Men and women in the Pea Corps work with people in the developing 
A
countries to help them improving their living conditions. B	C D
Question 36: Although not widely sold, that book is considered to be best book on the 
A B C D
subject.
Question 37: Because his sickness, he didn’t take part in the English competition held 
A B C D
last Sunday.
Question 38: I found my new contact lenses strangely at first, but I got used to them 
 A B C 
in the end.
D
Question 39: Dreaming, like all other mental processes, it is a product of the brain 
A B C 
and its activity.
 D
Read the following passage and mark the letter A,B,C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions from 40 to 49.
Acid rain will not be an easy problem (36) . . As more and more countries become (37) . , there will be more and more competition for petroleum for cars, home heating, and indusrty, while (38)  petroleum contributes greatly (39). acid rain, it is less polluted than coal. Unfortunately petroleum is more (40) . than coal and no one knows exactly (41) . petroleum is left. Therefore, there will be a pressure to burn coal for energy. Coal is a (42)  dirtier energy source than petroleum. Since we already know how (43) . acid rain is, it is important (44)  we increase our efforts to find a (45) . source of energy as quickly as possible, so that we can advoid further environmental damage.
Question 40: A. solve	B. to solve	C. solved	D. solving
Question 41: A. industry	B. industrial	C. industrialize	D. industrialized
Question 42: A. firing	B. shooting	C. burning	D. cooking
Question 43: A. to 	B. for	C. at	D. with
Question 44: A. expensiv