RYAN S.

DIGAN- MAED- ENGLISH

LED 404- LANGUAGE TESTING
Essay in Assessing students writing, reading, listening and speaking performance:
As teachers we care deeply about the quality of our own teaching and the development of
teaching as a profession. We write this from our conviction that performance assessments in teaching
are a critical strategy for developing teachers expertise and for improving the quality of teachers
preparation. Our role as teachers in relation to classroom assessment used to go something like we
graded our students according to whether or not they had passed or failed, and such information was
recorded first in our individual class records and then in the students report cards. The basis for these
judgments was sometimes difficult to pin down. Somehow we knew if we were experienced, when a
performance was satisfactory and when it was not.
As teacher in a public school and handling more than 60 students in a class, it needs extra effort,
passion, and dedication in assessing students performance thoroughly. We are not only assessing their
mental capacity but also their moral, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects for meaningful learning
outcomes. Nowadays, that in an era in which curriculum documents describe specific standards- and
national testing programs evaluate students performance against these standards- the teachers role is
one in which they are asked to make sure that increasingly greater numbers of their students are able to
demonstrate the ability to meet the standards.
However, in assessing standards in writing as far as teaching experience is concerned, I have
observed that many of my students with learning disabilities experience difficulties in mastering the
process of writing. And as such, it is not easy to assess students in this king of aspect because in the first
place they can hardly express their point of views through writing most particularly if I will be giving test
that needs to elaborate. As teacher, I have to design a definite instruction which is not limited to a single
teacher or grade. In addition, it is maybe a must that in designing the instruction it requires a coherent,
coordinated, and extended effort.
The writing problems of students most probably in a public school are not unusual. Sometimes,
even in a higher level we can still see and observe students who have difficulty in writing. And as a
teacher, it is part of our goal and responsibility to minimize if not eradicates the said problem for a
normal and responsive classroom setting. In my own experience and as a reading coordinator in my
station, I provided and designed some recommendations and programs that can help the said problem.
Maybe, by providing effective writing instruction, employ technological tools that improve students
writing performance and giving them extra time in expressing their views and opinions through writing.
Base on my own experience it is better to plan and implement activities that support students in
meeting the learning goals and begin giving feedback early in the writing process and most especially
give them opportunities in expressing themselves in writing.
On the part of speaking, it has been said that among the macro- skills of language, it is been
widely recognized that speaking, particularly in a second or foreign language, is the most difficult
language skill to assess. And base on my own experience as a classroom teacher, it is very hard to assess
students performance in speaking because there are no definite and exact criteria in grading students
capacity in speaking. It is generally acknowledge that the assessment of speaking is one of the most
challenging and complex areas of assessment. This is due to various reasons including the difficulty of
developing an operational construct definition of oral performance that can capture the richness of oral
communication and human interaction, the multiplicity of communication skills that require oral
interaction- skills that do not lend themselves easily to objective assessment, the range of factors that
influence our impression of how well a student speak a language. However, even if it is very difficult in
our part to assess students performance in this aspect of field of skills and despite of the problems
involved in the assessment, but still speaking is one of the most common human speaking test that
assessment of oral proficiency is a complex and largely subjective process in which many variables affect
the quality and quantity of language output, while rating of performance ultimately threatens the
validity, reliability and fairness of the oral test procedure. Since that there are no definite criteria in
scaling students speaking ability that is why it turns to be subjective. In a usual classroom setting, there
are really students who have brilliant ideas as to their opinions but they can hardly utter words
especially in using the second language. A certain speaker of a second language might have the difficulty
in speaking maybe because of several factors. That is why as a language teacher it is good that you will
give the student enough opportunities in speaking as possibly as they could most probably in their day
to day living.