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It can be difficult to assess reading and listening skills. When students speak or write in English, you can listen to what they say or read what they write. However, when they read or listen to English, it is difficult to know what they understand. Table 2 shows some activities you can do to collect information about what your students have understood when reading or listening to a text. These activities can be carried out in the course of regular classroom teaching, or as informal tests to form part of formative assessment.
| Comprehension questions | Students listen to or read a passage in English, and answer questions about it. You can use questions from the textbook, write your own, or even ask students to write questions. Questions and answers can be in English or your home language. This can be very beneficial for students who can read or listen to texts well, but struggle to write in English. If they can write in their home language, they can say what they have understood. It can be useful for students to review questions before they start reading or writing, so that they know what they need to find or listen out for. |
| Writing summaries | Students listen to or read a passage in English and write a summary about what they have understood. This can be written in the home language so that you are not assessing the students’ writing skills but whether they have understood what they have heard or read. You can encourage students to take notes as they listen or read. They can use these notes to write the summaries. |
| Discussions | Students can talk or write about what they found interesting or enjoyable in a text. This can be particularly useful with texts from the supplementary reader. They can discuss in English or the home language, as the purpose of doing this is to find out what they have understood. |
Some teachers use reading aloud as a way to assess their students’ reading skills. There are, however, some problems with using this technique for this purpose as it doesn’t really tell you how much students have understood about a passage. In fact, it is more of a test of students’ pronunciation skills.
Some teachers use dictation as a way of getting students to practise speaking, listening and writing. Dictations can be easy to mark and grade, and students can mark their own and each other’s work. However, in dictations, students don’t often focus on the meaning of what is being said, so make sure that you use other activities as well if you want to have a good idea of your students’ listening skills.
To get a sense of your students’ reading and listening abilities, it is best to use a variety of activities, with as many different texts as you can. These texts can be from the textbook, the supplementary reader or any other text [such as a story or newspaper article]. For listening, you could read a short section of any of these. If you have access to a radio or a mobile phone with a speaker, you could play an audio recording. Whenever you do an activity like this, give students plenty of time to read a text, and let students listen to passages more than once.
In the text above, you read about a variety of techniques that you can use in your regular classroom teaching to assess your students’ skills at reading and listening [such as writing summaries, dictation, etc.]. Make a copy of the table below and fill in how you are going to use the techniques over the next month. You will find a completed table with examples in Resource 5.
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Pause for thought After you have followed your plan for a month, answer these questions. Discuss them with a colleague if you can.
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If you have a large class, it may be very difficult to assess all of your students over the course of a month. Your diary will help you to see which students you haven’t observed. Try to do as many as you can, and make sure that you don’t focus on the same students each time. It may also be possible to involve students in assessing one another in paired or group work and also in self-assessment.
Your observations will help you to see which students need help, and you can plan your teaching accordingly. For example, perhaps some of your students didn’t perform very well in the dictation. You can focus on those words or grammar points that they struggled with. You should communicate your observations to your students in the form of clear feedback, so that they can have a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses. Make sure to let your students know what they are doing well, as well as about the areas where they can improve. Give them clear tips about what they can do to improve.
Assessing your students is easier if you make a plan. That way, you can see what you are going to do, and when and how you are going to do it. If your plan hasn’t worked, make another one and try some different techniques. See what works for you and your class. The important thing is to keep trying. You can use the framework above to plan assessment for speaking and writing too.
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Speaking is often one of the areas of learning English that is not usually assessed. However, speaking is an important skill for students to develop, and it is important to include activities in the English classroom that provide opportunities for students to speak in English. These could be telling a story, a role play, an interview or a discussion. Assessing speaking activities can tell you about your students’ progress in English, what they have learned, how confidently they can speak in English, or whether they are having problems speaking English.
Pause for thought Think about your students and classroom as you answer the next questions. If you can, discuss them with a colleague.
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Now compare your thoughts with what some teachers do to assess speaking. Are any of these ideas possible for you and your class? Note the ones that are.
You can use any speaking activities to assess speaking skills, especially activities where students talk about themselves or an interesting topic. Activities such as reading a text aloud are not very useful for assessing speaking skills, as the only aspect of speaking that these activities assess is pronunciation. They don’t take other aspects of speaking into account such as speaking confidently and fluently, taking part in activities, using vocabulary and grammar accurately and so on.
Often in speaking activities students are demonstrating what they have understood from a reading or listening activity. So keep in mind that when you are assessing speaking, you are often assessing other skills at the same time.
Mrs Agarwal teaches English to Class IX students in a non-English medium government secondary school. She tells about the last time she assessed her students’ speaking skills.
My class was doing an interview in English. They were working in groups of four [see Figure 1]. Two had written questions and were playing the role of journalists; the other two were taking it in turns to play the role of the interviewee [on this occasion, a famous film star].
Figure 1 Mrs Agarwal assesses her students while they take part in a role play activity.
I decided to listen and assess just two groups this time. Last time, I focused on other students, and next time I will focus on some different ones.
I keep a diary for my class, and in it I make notes and keep records of my students’ performance and grades. One part of my diary is related to speaking skills, with a grid showing names, the date and type of activity, and then different aspects of speaking [see Table 4].
As my students carry out the speaking activity, I stand by them, listen and make notes [see Table 5].
| Rahul | 06.01.14, interview | ✓✓ | ✓✓ | ✓✓ | ✓✓✓ | ✓✓ |
| Anju | 06.01.14, interview | ✓✓ | ✓✓✓ | ✓✓ | ✓✓ | ✓ |
You can see that I just use a simple ‘tick’ system. One tick means that the student is having problems; two ticks means that they are adequate; three ticks means that they are performing very well. The grid is very quick and easy to complete. I keep these informal records about students to help to get an understanding of each student’s progress and to contribute to their overall assessment. I then share my notes with the students so that they have a sense of their own abilities and what they need to work on.
In Case Study 2, Mrs Agarwal used a record sheet to informally assess students’ speaking skills, which she shares that with her students as feedback. Make a similar grid for your students, and try it out with one or two groups the next time your students are doing a speaking activity. You can use ticks, as in the case study, or you can add grades or comments. Make sure you let your students know what you are doing and share your feedback with them after the activity.
Pause for thought After trying a record sheet in your classroom, think about the following questions:
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Feel free to change the grid. If it is difficult to use, simplify it and try again. If you find that one area is not as important as another, you can award more or fewer ticks. What is important is finding a grid that works for you and your students, and that allows you to collect information about your students’ speaking skills and share it with them in a way that is meaningful and will help them improve.
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Like speaking, writing in English is not just about producing grammatically accurate sentences. Writing a text involves a number of skills, and students may have spent some time writing drafts and reviewing their own and each other’s’ work.
Think about your students and classroom as you answer the following question. If you can, share your ideas with a colleague.
Imagine that your students have written a text in English, such as a report about a school event. Imagine that you have collected your students’ work and that you are now assessing it. What will you give marks for?
When you assess written English – especially longer texts such as reports, compositions, letters and so on – you can consider the following questions:
- Is the text appropriate? [For example, has the student written a report about a local school event, or has the student described the school in general?]
- Is the text clear and easy to understand? Is it organised and sequenced logically?
- Is there a wide range of vocabulary? Are words repeated often?
- Are there any spelling or grammar mistakes, or mistakes with punctuation?
- Is the style appropriate for the reader? [For example, a report about an event should be factual, and it should also be interesting to read.]
- What’s good about the text? What is interesting about it? Has the writer thought about the reader of the text?
Note the final point in the list above: it is important to say what is good about a piece of work. This encourages students, and helps them to see what the purpose of writing is – not a vehicle for memorising and copying texts, but for expressing ideas and conveying a message to a reader.
Now read a case study about a teacher who has just assessed some written work of his Class X students, and see how he uses questions like the ones above to grade his students’ work, and to give feedback to individuals.
First Flight, NCERT’s Class X textbook. The chapter features an extract from Anne Frank’s diary. At the end of the chapter is a writing exercise, detailed below.
Now you know what a diary is and how to keep one. Can you keep a diary for a week recording the events that occur? You may share your diary with your class, if you wish to. Use the following hints to write your diary.
- Though your diary is very private, write as if you are writing for someone else.
- Present your thoughts in a convincing manner.
- Use words that convey your feelings, and words that ‘paint pictures’ for the reader.
- Be brief.
For this activity, I told students to write 50–100 words each day over the following week at home, and to bring in their completed diary after a week. Before they began writing, we discussed some ideas of what they could write about, and each day, I reminded them that they should be writing.
After one week, I put students into groups of four or five. I told them: ‘Choose one interesting diary entry and share it with the group.’ I allowed them ten minutes.
I then asked ten students to give me their diaries. I would like to look at each student’s diary but that’s difficult for me – I have 47 students, and there is a writing exercise in every other chapter of the textbook. I just haven’t got the time to read and grade 47 pieces of written work that often! So what I do is take in work from ten different students each time so that I get to see written work from every student.
I then read through the ten diaries, and gave them feedback using questions, covering these areas:
- Is this written as a diary?
- Is it clear and easy to understand?
- Is there a wide range of vocabulary?
- Are there mistakes with grammar, spelling and punctuation?
- What’s good about the diary entries?
I wrote comments in each area and then gave a grade out of ten for each question to make a total of 50. The feedback is much more important for the students to help improve their learning, but the grade was easy for me to record and quickly copy into my notebook. Here is the feedback I gave to one student:
- This is clearly written as a diary. You have clearly marked each day of the week, and have written about things that happened each day, and have conveyed your feelings. You have written between 50–100 words each day. Well done. [10/10]
- The diary is mostly clear and easy to read, but I don’t understand exactly what happened on Tuesday. Can you make this clearer? [7/10]
- You have used quite a good range of vocabulary, and you have used some different words to convey your feelings. You could have used more words for ‘happy’ – for example,‘glad’, ‘pleased’ or‘delighted’. Try to work on developing your vocabulary. [6/10]
- There are a number of mistakes with the grammar, spelling and punctuation. Look at the corrections I have made and review the correct spellings. You should also review the rules for forming the past simple tense. Ask me if you have any questions. [5/10]
- You have tried hard to make this interesting for the reader by writing about some interesting events and describing how you felt. I enjoyed your diary entry for Thursday. What a funny story! [9/10]
Overall grade: 37/50 [Good, but keep working on your vocabulary, grammar and spelling.]
When I read through and graded the ten diaries, I noticed that most of the students had problems in using the past simple and present perfect tenses correctly. I then decided that I would review these tenses using some of the examples from the diaries in the following class. It’s clear that this class needs more practice in writing about their experiences.
This activity worked well and students liked having questions to guide their work and my feedback. This helped them know what to focus on. Since it is difficult for me to provide feedback to each student, the next time I do this I might try having the students assess each other’s work and give each other feedback.
In Case Study 3, Mr Sampath assessed the written work that his students did as part of their regular classroom teaching. He assessed diary entries, but you can use the same techniques to assess any kind of writing activity:
- Find the next writing exercise in your textbook. Alternatively, you could create a writing activity such as some paragraphs about a topic in the textbook, a letter, a report, a story, or a diary, like the teacher did in Case Study 3.
- Write the questions you will use for assessment on chart paper or on the blackboard, so your students know what you will be grading and what is important to think about when writing. Discuss the questions so that students are aware of what they need to do to get a good mark. You could give them some examples. You can use these questions to begin with:
- a.Is the text appropriate? For instance, if you asked the student to write a story, have they written one? Or have they written a different kind of text, such as a report?
- b.Is the text clear and easy to understand? Is it organised and sequenced logically?
- c.Is there a wide range of vocabulary? Are words repeated often?
- d.Are there any spelling or grammar mistakes, or mistakes with punctuation?
- e.Is the style appropriate for the reader?
- f.What’s good about the text? What is interesting about it? Has the writer thought about the reader of the text?
- When students have finished, take in their work. If you have a large class, take in the work of a group of your students. If you do this, make sure that you choose different students each time. You could also ask students to assess each other’s work using the grid.
- When you grade their work, try to include comments for each student in easy-to-understand terms that they can use for improvement.
- Record the grades in your notebook.
- What has the assessment told you about your students’ learning? Are there areas you need to review again?
Pause for thought Here are some questions for you to think about after trying this activity. If possible, discuss these questions with a colleague.
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You may find that the questions suggested in this activity are not completely appropriate for your students and the writing task. You can experiment with and change the questions, perhaps omitting some and adding others. Discuss appropriate questions with your colleagues if you can, or with your students.
Make sure that the questions are clear to your students and that the feedback that you give them based on the questions is simple and easy to follow. You can check this by giving them an opportunity to implement changes based on the feedback, and by checking these changes.
These questions can also be useful for students to review or assess their own work, or to use to assess each other’s written work. Therefore, it may not always be necessary for you to check and grade your students’ work, as they can check their own and each other’s. [For more information on this, see also the unit Whole-class writing routines.]
For further information, take a look at our frequently asked questions which may give you the support you need.
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