PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

 Since I started my teaching experience I have been involved in the process of designing exams to assess or sometimes just to grade my students. When the time of evaluations arrives, it is a nightmare for all the teachers, just for thinking on how long the test would be or how much time we are going to take for grading it. However, after reading the text Principles of language assessment I can realize why we have this conception. 

There are five principles that we need to know and take into account in our tests mention by the author, those are:  practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity and washback. What are they about? It is mention that a test shouldn’t be difficult to administer and needs to have a specific and time efficient scoring procedure to make it practical. The reliability is related to accuracy, consistency, dependability or fairness of scores. Validity is the most relevant and complex factor. It deals with content, objectives, and students criteria. Besides, it has to be appropriate, meaningful and useful in terms of purpose of assessment. An authentic test has interesting topics, describes a real world context, items are contextualized rather than isolated and the language used is as natural as possible. Finally, it is important to give students the chance to be aware of their weaknesses and how they could improve, this is the washback principle.

I was not aware of those concepts and perhaps I was not the only. After reading the chapter and learn about the principles of assessment, It would be a challenge for me design test which includes these features but I’m sure that this challenge will bring a great satisfaction to me as teacher and at the same time better and meaningful results for my students.