Assessment

Teachers must be knowledgeable with various reasons and ways of assessing students, as well as the fact that some standard evaluation techniques might be problematic for younger students. As a result, it's critical that children's language acquisition assessments be treated with care.

Assessment should focus on the development of language use in performance assessments in order to 'give the children opportunities to use the language for real purposes, in real or realistic situations, and assess their attempts to do so successfully,' in order to best suit the realities of young learners. (McKay, 2005)

Assessment for learning (AFL) is an approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is then used to improve students' performance.

Assessment of learning is about assessing and reporting, which is used to categorize pupils and communicate their assessments to others once they have occurred. (Earl 2013)

German (2004) coined the phrase diagnostic assessment. Defined as teachers' ability to interpret foreign language growth in children through one-to- one attention to individual learner production. Various diagnostic activities, which include careful scaffolding of learners and a general ability to exploit each learning/teaching situation fully. Some of these techniques, for example, are:

• Guess what a child might want to say and motivate them to say it 

• Interpret silence 

• Group children according to their needs 

• Evoke children's prior knowledge 

• Recognize from children's facial expressions whether they understood something 

• Adapt teacher language readily depending on each child's level of competence.

Child-friendly methods and a variety of assessment tools: Observation, Self-assessment and peer-assessment, portfolio assessment, project work.

 

Sources:

Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017

McKay, P. (2005). Assessing Young Language Learners (Cambridge Language Assessment). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511733093

Earl, L. M. (2013). Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning. Corwin.

https://cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswafl/index.html