Goal 3.1 To describe techniques to assess the 4 skills

Speaking
Technique	Description	Advantages	Disadvantages
Monitoring speaking activities as they happen	Based on the criteria we establish, one can grade the students’ performance during their participations.	Can ease them into formal assessments (knowing they are being evaluated can cause stress and create pressure for them akin to formal assessment). Gives us a basis for our future evaluations.	It can be hard to do if you're busy with other things at the time Students’ performance may change for better or worse if they know they are being assessed
Systematizing our criteria	By assigning values to the different elements and competencies we expect from their performance we can get a clearer idea of how good they are doing.	We get a more objective-oriented result  based on subjective criteria we decided we would assess at the time, always taking into account the students’ level.	If we give them too much to worry about, criteria-wise, this can cause a negative effect on the students that can make them perform worse or become demoralized.
Observing their communication skills during class	A teacher can assess the way in which students communicate in the goal language while doing other team activities.	We get an idea of their real communicative skills Lower stress levels than during speaking exercises	It might not work if they just avoid using the goal language   Some students might just prefer not communicating much even if they have the knowledge to do so
Listening
Technique	Description	Advantages	Disadvantages
Observing how well they react to oral instructions	One can assess based on how well they understand instructions or even ask them to raise their hand if they did understand.	It can help minimize misunderstandings	Students can just say they did understand to avoid being put on the spot
Asking them to summarize or explain what they just heard.	Whether about class information, an instruction or a participation, their ability to recycle information will depend on how well they understand it initially	Can also help them improve their talking skills   Can help other students understand if they haven't yet	Students might have understood but not have the lexical knowledge to translate it into new words
Basing other activities on the content of listening material	If the information they have to work with is a listening material, one can assess based on how well and how much of the information they use	The students practice multiple skills at a time	It can sometimes be unclear if they focused on specific information because they didn’t understand much or because of any other reason
Reading
Technique	Description	Advantages	Disadvantages
Monitor the students while they are reading a text.	Listen for audio clues and look out for visual cues on the students’ understanding. Audio clues such as repeating or trying to pronounce the same word for a while or visual ones such as their body language and facial expressions.	Will allow you to assess the students in a very informal way without them necessarily knowing it. Can give a lot of input based on the text they need to read (does it have a lot of adjectives, specific letter combinations ph-, ch- etc.)	Does not provide all that much input on what they are struggling with and some students may just have a different reading “style” (some read “out loud”, repeat a lot, etc.). Us (the teacher) being over them at a certain time might get them nervous and perform worse. Maybe too informal and unpractical.
Summarizing or extracting the main idea of a text.	They read a level-appropriate text and relay the most important aspects of it, it can either be orally or written.	Exemplifies their reading comprehension skills and gives them material to read (practice).	Can be time consuming if there are too many students. Some students may get stuck if they don’t know the definition of a word.
Review questions and answers with the group based on a text.	After each question, give the answer and ask a raise of hands of who got them right. After they read a text that should be for their level.	Allows you to see who raises their hand the most and least. No as stressful as a test and if not based on overall score, they are more likely to be honest with their answers.	Some students still might want to “up” their score and lie on how many they got right. Since they will all be lifting their hands at the same time, it might be difficult to keep track of individual progress.
Writing
Technique	Description	Advantages	Disadvantages
Feedback	Teacher will make sure feedback is given to the student in the most appropriate way. Making sure the student uses the feedback so they grow in areas they need too.	Teachers can make a list of things the students need to improve on making it easier on the student to know what he needs to improve on. Student gets a more clear idea on what they need to work on	This is very time consuming for the teacher because they do not just give feedback to one person. Student can simply not care and not use the feedback to self-improve.
Choose the most important pieces of writing that students can work on.	As a teacher our job is to decide on what sort of compositions we are going to assess. By doing this we will consider the amount of writing we will be monitoring and grading.	Teachers will have full control of what is going to be graded from the get go, leading to an easier time to help students.	Assessing the writing can take up to much time. Keeping track of everyone can be very difficult at times as well since you have to keep track of more than one student.
Use a positive reinforcement grading system to help students improve their writing and feel better about learning. Mainly used for grading essays and homework/ class work.	By using positive reinforcement students will feel more comfortable learning and feel more engaged with the class. We can do this by making a grading system EX: 5 - Excellent Writing. 4 - Great job. 3 - Nice Work, I know you can do better. 2 - Needs improvement, I know you can do it. 1 - Poor Writing	Students will feel emotionally encouraged to try harder when receiving positive reinforcements for their writing. Makes it easier for the students to know how they are doing at the moment.	Very time consuming since you have to grade everything and write down the corrections for every student.