บทความทางวิชาการ
Assessing Learning in English: A Paradigm Shift
Hope Cristina H. Deita
How do language teachers know that students have learned a language? They assess students using formative and summative assessments but how do they know that students will actually be able to use their language in real-life, authentic situations? How do we know that students are competent in the target language? One way to judge this competency is through students’ performance. However, is performance an accurate measure of what students actually know? Chomsky defines “competence” as “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language.
The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance. Noting the distinction between competence and performance is useful primarily because it allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the language. In the recent past, many language instruction programs have focused more on the “knowing” (competence) part of learning a language wherein words and sentences are presented and practiced in a way to best help learners internalize the forms. The assumption here is that once the learners have ‘learned’ the information they will be able to use it through reading, writing, listening and speaking. The disadvantage of this approach is that the learners are unable to use the language in a natural way. Having been trained to learn the language through “knowing”, learners have difficulty reversing this training and actually “doing” something with the language. Even in college-level learning, the same problems are evident. It is quite odd to see high scores on midterm and final examinations yet in reality, students cannot write a well-structured sentence.
In brief, it is difficult to assess whether the learners’ insufficient proficiency is due to limitations of competency or a lack of performance. What does an emphasis on assessment mean for language teachers and students? How does test and test formats affect learning? Are language teachers really measuring proficiency with foreign language tests they designed?
The paper was published in Sripatum Chonburi Journal in 2013.
