Designing Classroom Language Tests

When considering the critical questions we should ask ourselves as teachers when assessing students by means of tests, it is necessary to think about the first thing that we must try to avoid, and it is that a lot of teachers don’t even think of others apart from themselves, they do not devote time to set the purpose or the objectives of what they have to assess, and they do not go through the necessary process that leads into effective assessment practices. As teachers we already know unconsciously that the tests are made to evaluate students’ performance and to know if they are learning what is being taught during the lesson; what we sometimes ignore is the different kinds of tests that can be applied to students according to their needs and also our needs as tutors. This lack of information and instruction about tests can lead us to assess our students in ways that do not match the purposes, and to obtain results that are not reliable.

The language aptitude tests seem unreliable to me… I don’t think that in a few questions anyone can determine whether you are good or not for something like languages –or anything-. There are plenty of factors that influence your process, such as your attitude and disposition to decide to learn, the time you spent studying, and so on and so forth. I’ve had many students that, although they don’t seem very “talented” (maybe their intelligences point towards other areas), they study a lot and manage to accomplish things that many others who seem to have aptitudes for the language don’t.

I do agree with the placement and diagnostic tests, since these are indeed helpful for the teachers. It is great to know that you have a group in which all students have the same level, this fact reduces the great number of concerns you have at the moment of teaching during a lesson and gives you some kind of confidence at the moment of challenging your students. Apart from that, if you also know the different outstanding abilities of each of the students, it is easier to plan the lesson taking into account those aspects.

It seems to me that although we are more familiar with proficiency, placement and diagnostic tests –as students and teachers- we still need to pay more attention to the way those test are designed and to the situations in which each one of them is taken by students, we must always try to assess them in the proper way so that better results in their processes are achieved.