Validity (Fairness) in Language Assessment

The Main Points:

In the reading Fairness and justice for all, the author makes a detailed analysis of fairness in language assessment including validity, access and justice which is critical and so different with the traditional language assessment. And four critical areas are also involved and are associated with fairness: research, test development, legal challenges, and test development.

The reading “validity in language assessment” is focused on validity in language assessment. According to the research of development in validity, the current definition has been formed. And the current progressive matrix adapted by Messick stresses the evidence and consequences. At the same time, the current changes are also important to justify the validity in language assessment.

My Interaction:

Language assessment is also an important part in learning and teaching. Traditionally, the English learners are assessed through the scores. However, the assessment of validity is also changed. Validity refers to the conception what constitutes a good language test for a particular situation. Content and criterion are used to investigate construct validity. Also the evidence and consequences are used in a validity arguemrnt. The current changes of defining language construct and developing validity is to apply validation theory to testing practice. Therefore the validity in language assessment is very principle.

Fairness is another component to assess the language which is not only about validity, and access and justice. In our teaching, we still consider the financial, personal, educational social aspects to test takers in learning English.

Week 11: Writing Assessment

The main points:

Compared with the traditional methods, the effects of Dynamic Assessment in EFL writing process are stressed in this reading “A Case Study of Dynamic Assessment in EFL Process Writing” to fascinate EFL learners’ writing abilities and motivation. Due to the detailed analysis of three stages: topic choice, idea-generation&structuring and revising, teacher as the mediation also has an important influence and encourages their Zone of Proximal Development.

According to examine writing assessment of 48 highly experienced instructors of EFL composition, “ESL/EFL instructors’ practices for writing assessment: specific purposes or general purposes?” discusses the difference between specific purses and general purposes. However the specific purses have limits which mainly focus on the form of written texts; while the general purposes are supported which are concentrated on development of their writing abilities and seem to more conform to educational conceptualization.

The reading “The Effects of Portfolio Assessment on Writing of EFL Students” focused on the effects of portfolio assessment. Compared with tradition system (non-portfolio), the portfolio assessment, as a self-reflection assessment, has a more important influence to improve learners’ writing and gain higher scores in final examination.

My interaction portion:

Writing is a complicated part in learning English for ESL learners. So many training and ways are applied to improve it, also the advice from teachers are often used. The aim for ESL learners is to gain a higher score in final exam and enhance their writing abilities in daily life. Therefore the process of writing assessment is involved and also is not simple.

Teacher seems to act as a lead and mediation role in teaching writing, who gives those valuable recommends in the process of writing and leads them to an exact orientation if ideas of them is not suitable. After that, in practice teacher encourages their proximal development, which is powerful to cultivate their writing skills.

Also, there are many assessment methods to assess their writing, which is not a single part, but a collection of teachers and students. The process of writing assessment is dynamic, continuous and mutual effort and should be considered as a whole. There is no doubt the final aim is coincident. Hence the improvement of writing abilities is just a long-term goal to accord with educational orientation and is most principle in future learning.

Week 9: How to Enhance Reading Comprehension

The Main Points:

According to the analysis the motivation of extensive reading of Japanese students in the reading “Driven to read: Enthusiastic readers in a Japanese high school’s extensive reading program”, it is obvious that intrinsic motivation (attitude, emotion, and pleasure) as the most important factor to accelerate students’ extensive reading. Now as a young learn, we should go beyond stereotype and look for enjoyment, satisfaction and knowledge for EFL learning.

In the reading “Two Types of Input Modification and EFL Reading Comprehension: Simplification and Elaboration”，the author mainly emphasized the difference between EFL reading comprehension (general, specific, and inferential comprehension) and two types of input modification (simplification and elaboration). After the detailed analysis of Korean students, we can know that simplification usually promotes the students’ reading comprehension without consideration the proficiency; while elaboration enhances it with consideration both high and low proficiency.

Teacher always plays a very important role in our learning. “Investigating Teacher Attitudes to Extensive Reading Practices in Higher Education: Why isn’t everyone doing it?” indicates teacher’s cognition, attitude and belief have a deep influence on extensive reading and keeping the positive relation between teacher cognition and classroom practice. In today’s teaching, it is so necessary to do the teacher education.

My Interaction Portion:

Extensive reading seems to become an evident mark to examinant the students’ learning. However, the effects of teachers are not been neglected. For teachers, they are responsible to guide students and make the orientation of extensive reading experience. There are two types of modification to help us make sense of it.

Simplification consists of the use of shorter utterances, simpler syntax, and simpler lexis, deletion of sentence elements or morphological inflections, and preference for canonical word order. The goal of linguistic simplification is to improve readability. When simplifying a text for English learners, the purpose of adaptation is to eliminate overly complex language that might prevent a student from understanding the main ideas of the text. Elaboration involves increasing redundancy and actualizing underlying thematic relations straightforwardly. Elaborated texts aim to clarify, elaborate, and explain implicit information and make connections explicit. To this end, words are often added to increase comprehension. The goal is to make a text more coherent and limit the ambiguity within it. However in practice, the comprehension of text involves a combination of simplification and elaboration.

It is not the teacher’ responsibility, learners are the principle parts. In order to gain the better outcome, they should foster a habit of learning after multiply reading. They can pursuit for learning development according to individuals’ characteristics.

Week 8: Metacognitive Stretegy

The Main Points:

After reading “Metacognition and EFL/FSL Reading”, I make sense of the meaning of metacogniton. According to research on the process of training reading strategies for language learners, five components “what, why, how to use, where and when, how to evaluate strategy” are necessary to know. Maybe for L1 learners, it is unnecessary to use all of them. However for EFL learners in n reading, grasping the reading strategy with matacognition will beneficial for us.

In order to attain a detailed relationship between cognitive and matacognitive strategy, the author of the reading “A Closer Look at the Relationship of Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy Use to EFL Reading Achievement Test Performance” make the validation research on language test performance. For EFL learners, their strategies include learning strategy and use strategy. However language testing (LT) focuses more on use strategy than learning strategy. All in all, language test performance and the ways learners used simultaneously have the important effects on cognitive and matacognitive strategy, which also suggests we should concentrate on strategy competence in future research.

In the reading “Constructivist Pedagogy in Strategic Reading Instruction Exploring Pathways to Learner Development in the English as a Second language (ESL) Classroom”，constructivist pedagogy refer to make students know how to study and which strategy they can use in learning. It turns out that strategy-based instruction in language teaching has a good influence on learner development.

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My Interaction Portion:

At first, we have to admit the differences between cognition and metacognition and effects of them on learners. Specifically, cognition is a term that indicates the acquisition of knowledge through the act of thinking or sensing. Metacognition is often referred to as “thinking about thinking.” It is self-awareness of your own thought processes and the ability to incorporate cognitive input to monitor and control knowledge attainment. It helps us to manage incoming information and make it more comprehensible.

Also, the cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies as key elements lead the test takers to obtaining their required scores in the reading section of the test. In order to make the candidates good strategy users, conscious instruction of strategies especially metacognitive ones is strongly recommended. Accelerated development of meta-cognitive skills is very important to learners. At the same time, matacognitive learning is a process of acquiring a number of skills required to enhance one's personality. Metacognitive strategies can help them to develop highly critical cognitive functions. In simple words, the student must also possess the necessary metacognitive skills to analyze the problem, select an appropriate strategy to solve problems.

As for teachers, they play very important roles in development of learners learning all the time. Therefore when we discuss the learning/teaching strategy, e can’t ignore the influence of teachers. From my perspective, they have responsibility to encourage learners to think about what they need to know and be able to do is also important in learning. Another aspect is encouraging learners to see themselves as people who construct knowledge themselves rather than relying on "expert" teachers. Designing a learning environment involves creating learning opportunities that focus on the development and practice of skills that learners want so they can carry out activities and gain their goals. It also involves learners working as a collaborative team to identify and solve problems together.

Week 7: A Good Teaching Approach----Extensive Reading

The Main Points:

Nowadays, extensive reading has become one of the most significant ways for language learners to gain knowledge. The reading “Extensive Reading: Why and How” also focuses on the importance of extensive reading programs. In our learning, there are so many benefits supplied and some are new for me to understand, like the concept ‘exposure’ which I think is the simple and selected or given by our teachers or others. The extensive can reduce precisely the difference between L1 and L2 learners. However apart from these, many suggestions are presented which make the students and teachers figure out what they should in daily learning how to have the perfect performance in reading and language learning.

In the reading “Extensive Reading in English as a Second Language”, the author makes 3 different experiments to demonstrate that there are the positive effects of extensive reading on second language learner which not only let reluctant students become eager readers but also make students exceed traditional students in EFL. In addition, teachers should have the exact ways to encourage them, so that they will get good outcome in EFL learning.

The advantages of extensive reading have been indicated in above readings. And the author of “We Acquire Vocabulary and Spelling by Reading: Additional Evidence for the Input Hypothesis” pays more attention to gaining vocabulary and spelling. According to the detailed comprehension with the Skill-Building Hypothesis (SBH) and the Output Hypothesis (OH), The Input Hypothesis (IH) is proved as the best for us to study and the comprehensible input is also the important part which can lead to competence in spelling and vocabulary.

My Interaction Portion:

Extensive reading is one of the important ways of teaching reading. One author wrote, “extensive reading means reading in quantity and in order to gain a general understanding of what is read." Extensive reading program has also become a hot topic in today’s teaching, which compared with what is called intensive reading. In extensive reading program, students read relatively simpler materials than in intensive reading program, and they just need to know the meaning rather than the specific words. Extensive reading, as partly mentioned above, is intended to develop good reading habits, to build up knowledge of vocabulary and structure, and to encourage a liking for reading", which mainly focus on its effects on learners' development.

Extensive reading is very different from usual classroom practice. For teachers, they are responsible to guide students and make the orientation of extensive reading experience. Teachers can encourage students to read as widely as possible and, as their language ability, reading ability and confidence increase, to read at progressively higher levels of difficulty. Guidance implies a sharing of the reading experience, which leads us to know more about extensive reading. However, the success of extensive reading program depends on several factors: How we are able to motivate the students to read; how the program is organized and implemented; and how their reading is monitored. Thus, these factors should be given careful consideration when implementing an extensive reading program.

After discussion in above, there are so many factors we should consider, which is not the single one but the integrated process. Extensive reading is what we can do now, but the more important is to cultivate the good teaching habit, which is not only beneficial for the learning, but also for the development in the future.

Week 6: Reading Teaching in EFL and Bilingual in Today's World

Key Points:

There are a lot of reading models for us in EFL reading. The key point is which is the suitable way and best for your reading. After reading “Reading in EFL: facts and fictions by Amos Paran”, I know also some other reading models like psycholinguistic model, which has bee built through the study of English reading, but it must be applicable to reading in all languages and all orthographies. And the top-down view of reading is obvious. However according to the restricted linguistic ability for L2 readers, they are more difficult to figure out the texts and rely more on guessing than L1 readers. For ourselves, all of us want to become a good reader. There are some perfect ways we can study, for example, trying our best to read and doing the specific exercises.

In my daily reading, skimming, scanning, guessing and other methods are usually used for me. But we should have different insights to treat every type of reading. In the reading “Second Language Reading Strategy Research at the Secondary and University Levels: Variations, Disparities, and Generalizability”, many evident tables and careful analysis of reading strategy research in different ages and backgrounds are revealed that keeping the general meaning and sometimes skipping the unimportant words can lead to a successful reader. All in all, the best way is to focus on the textual meaning as a whole and do the ‘global’ or top-down strategies, which are also of same importance for EFL readers, and make them more effective in reading.

Recently, bilingual is the very hot word in today’s world. Everyone wants to make ourselves become perfect and outstanding, the proficiency of language including the native and second language is also a good way. In my university and others like that, you have to have your second language beyond your major: English. I thing which is also the trendy of modern society, bilingual is urgently involved. However, there is a fierce conflict between English immersion and bilingual programs in “A Synthesis of Research on Language of Reading Instruction for English Language Learners”. Now it is not the time for debate, we should pay attention on the development of children in reading, maybe good science and good practice in their reading.

My Interaction:

I got to know that one person definite reading as “an active process that involves giving or constructing meaning provided that the text seems meaningful and we can relate the content to our previous experience and knowledge.” Reading is not just an activity. A person may read in order to gain information or verify existing knowledge, or in order to comment on a writer's ideas or writing style. Sometimes a person may also read for enjoyment, or to enhance knowledge of the language being read.

However, the skill of reading not only gives students what they need to be successful learners, but it also makes them more self-confident and eager to learn their whole life long. The strategies for teaching reading will go a long way in improving the reading skills of EFL and ESL students. All too often many people erroneously think that by only knowing all of the words in an article or story they will be able to completely understand its meaning. Nothing is farther from the truth.Teaching reading in EFL is a bit different than the way native speakers are taught to read.  While vocabulary is an important part of reading, teaching the reading skills of surveying, skimming, scanning, inference, predicting and guessing are just as important. Basically there are three types of reading skills, pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading.

• Pre-reading activities prepare the students for reading the text. They help the students gain an idea of what the text will be about and this increases their motivation to read.

• While-reading activities improve their ability to interact and understand the text.

• Post-reading activities which help students to critically analyze what they have read. Post-reading activities also increase the students’ understanding of the text.

On the other hand, Bilingual education is a broad term that refers to the presence of two languages in instructional settings. But he term depends upon many variables, including the native language of the students, the language of instruction, and the linguistic goal of the program, to determine which type of bilingual education is used. Students may be native speakers of the majority language or a minority language. The students' native language may or may not be used to teach content material. Bilingual education programs can be considered either additive or subtractive in terms of their linguistic goals, depending on whether students are encouraged to add to their linguistic repertoire or to replace their native language with the majority language.

It is estimated that between 60 and 75 percent of the world is bilingual, and bilingual education is a common educational approach used throughout the world. It may be implemented in different ways for majority and minority language populations, and there may be different educational and linguistic goals in different countries.

Week 5:The New Programmatic Issues In Teaching

Key Points:

The students’ EFL writing is deeply influenced by L1 writing instruction or experience. Now there are a lot of studies to analyze the effects. In the reading “Situated Writing Practices in Foreign Language Setting”, the author selected 12 studies which were divided into 3 stages in order to highlight the relationship between the students’ perceptions and use of rhetorical patterns from L1 to L2 or L2 to L1. And we also involve combine the cognitive and social perspectives to make sense of writing in teaching.

The author of the reading “Critical Evaluation of Writing Teaching Programs in Different Foreign Language Settings” collected lots of data to show EFL writing instruction in Germany, Poland, the USA, China, Japan and Spain. In every place, pedagogical practices and teacher education are completely analyzed. Therefore some considerations for the future of FL writing instruction are proposed.

From the reading “Training for Writing or Training for Reality?” we can know that it is necessary to balance the local realities and idealistic view in the education of writing teachers. As the language teachers, we should have the new view to face it.

My Interaction Portion:

The teaching environment is totally different in every country, especially in EFL writing teaching, which is influenced by a series of factors. Mostly, the previous knowledge and education training have the deep effects.

As an EFL writing teacher, everyone is responsible to have right teaching idea or way. However, maybe some aspects can constrain their abilities. The teaching program is nearly not been changed, so teachers need to adapt themselves to teaching in order to performance better. In detail, they are supposed to be prepared to listen, learn and adapt within the contexts and dynamics of their local teaching-learning situations. What's more, they’d better grasp the chance to improve themselves, for example going abroad to experience exotic culture and environment and so on. The aim of teaching is to encourage students and make the teaching get a better result. Thereby teachers and students should make effort to have a big success.