ASSESSINGN READING

                                       

Nowadays, some people feel the necessity to read in order to being informed about what is happening in the world, looking for that information through internet, magazines, newspapers, etc. Some of them read that information properly understanding the real message  but the others don’t; It could be due to the fact that the people that misunderstand the information have not had education about reading in its own language . So because of that people tend to reject reading or they take this as a boring activity.

Meanwhile, when a person decides to study English teaching program and start the  English learning process know that reading has been considered as one of the important skill, but it hasn´t been given the appropriate and special attention it deserves; one of the main flaws regarding this skill might be that it  is generalized, I mean, it is seen as something every student must know and therefore must perform well, then when it comes to teaching a foreign language, many tasks include it without taking into account strategies, whether the purpose is to use a bottom-up or top-down strategy; so the task becomes useless, because it doesn´t have a specific focus of attention.

One more aspect worth mentioning is that most of the times the skill of every single student is not considered, and as a consequence, it is impossible to know what to expect from him/her or to determine the special instruction, and feedback the student needs. According to this, reading tasks should be meaningful, and should get a lot of practice, having a purpose and a clear strategy in mind, this way the student will start to care more about it.

As a conclusion, I firmly believe that reading should be regarded as a very significant skill, because it not only allows the student to get involved with the language, but to create schema that will help him in his development and understanding of the other skills.
                                                                 

PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ASSESMENT

According with the reding of chapter #2 "Brown, H. D. Principles of languages assesment"  and the analysis of it, I could explore how these principles should and could be applied in formal tests and how some questions can help us to identify five main criteria at the moment of testing a test.

These principles are:

• Practicality: It is not expensive, it is within appropriate time constraint, it isrelatively easy to administer and scoring/evaluation procedure that is specific and it is time-efficient.
• Reliability: *"Consistency on assesment results" (Linn and Gronlund)                                                                                   *A test is reliably if: " You give the same test to the same student or matched students in two different occasions, the test should yield similar results." (Brown 2004)                                                                                      Some factors that might influence reliabilityof a test are:                                          * Students- Releated Reliability: The most common lerner related issue in reliability is caused by temporary illness, anxiety, fatigue, a bad day and other physical or phsychological factors.                                                            *Rater Reliability: It has two subdivisions (Inter-rater reliability: when two or more scores yield inconsistent scores of the same test. Some factor could be "lack of attention to scoring, inexperience, inattention") and (Intra-rater reliability: Scoring criteria, fatigue, bias toward particular "good" and "bad" students or simple carelessness)                              *Test Administration Reliability: It can be caused by administration facators. E.g: noisy from outside, photocopying variation, room condition, even condition of desks and chair.                                                                    *Test Reliability:
• Validity: "Measuring what should be measured"                                      *Content-Related Evidence: If a test examples the subject matter about which conclusions are to be drawn.                                                                       If a test requires the test taker to perform the behavior that is being measured.                                                                                                    *Criterion-Related Evidence: Is used to demostrate the accuracy of a measure or precedure by comparing in with another measure or procedure which has been demostrated to be valid.                                                              *Construct-Related Evidence: How well performance on the assesment can be interpreted as meaningful measure of some characteristics or quality.                                                                                                         *Consequential Validity: How well use of assesment results accomplishes purposes and avoids unintended effect.                                          *Face Validity: It refers  to the degree to which a test looks right, and appears to measure the knowledge or ability it claims to measure, based  on the subjective judgment of the examinees who take it, the administrative personnel who decide on its use, and other psychometrically unsophisticated observers (Mousavi, 2002, p. 244). 
• Authenticity: In a test, authencity may be present in the following ways: * Te language in the test is as natural as posible.                                            * Items are contextualized  rather than isolated.                                                  * Topics are meaningful: (relevant, interesting) for the learner.                          * Some thematic organization to items is provided, suchs as through a story line or episode.                                                                                    * Task represent, or closely approximate, real-world taks.
• Washback: Any language test or piece of assessment must have positive washback, by which I mean that the effect of the test on the teaching must be beneficial. This should be held in mind by the test constructors; it is only too easy to construct a test which leads, for example, to candidates learning material by heart or achieving high marks by simply applying test-taking skills rather than genuine language skills.

As a conlusion, testing and assessment occupy a big part of teachers' time and, maybe partly because of this, there is currently great interest in validity issues, washback and in the ethics of testing. More and more tests now have a pre-testing element built in to their construction and, in addition, there is a lot of research into the construction, marking and validation of 'subjective tests'.