Conferences and observations
Through conferences, individual students can have chances to receive direct feedback.
For the teacher’s part they can assume the role of a facilitator and guide, rather than a master controller and deliverer of final grades.
Observation
Teachers are engaged in a process of taking students’ performance and intuitively assessing it and using those evaluations to offer feedback. But teacher’s intuitions are not infallible hence the need of empirical means of observing their language performance.In the process checklists, charts, rating scales, sysmatic note taking and teacher’s jouornals can help to complement teacher’s intuitive observations and to provide a source of identifiable feedback to students. Through this, the naturalness of their linguistic performance will be maximized
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Jinny and Romy from E1
Conferences and Observations
In this section, the author mentions two alternatives in assessment: conferences and observations. Conference has become a standard part of process approach to teaching writing. It serves commenting on drafts of essays and reports, responding to journals, giving feedback on the results of performance on a test and advising on a student’s plan for a paper or presentation. So we assumed that interactions between teacher and student play a key role to make conference successful. Also, we’re concerned about the practicality of conference in Korean English class. If there are many beginners in class, conference can’t work well. Because writing is the most difficult part among 4 language skills to learn. But to the students whose English level is above intermediate, we expected conference will be one of powerful assessments.
We, Korean elementary teachers, used to perform observations in English class. We agreed that observations is proper in classroom situation because it can lower students’ anxiety of tests and evaluate students’ genuine abilities. Through using checklists, charts, rating scales, systematic note taking, and teachers’ journals, we can measure sentence-level oral production, interaction with classmates, frequency of student-initiated responses, evidence of listening comprehension and so on. The author emphasizes teachers should make it clear about why they are observing, what they are observing, how they will observe, and how they will convey their perceptions to their students in order to carry out classroom observation. In addition to this, teachers should be aware that observations can become systematic, planned procedures for real-time. If teachers take those considerations seriously before observations, face and content validity are likely to get high.
Yes. We can know a lot about our students, without a test. Observation can be more effective way to assess students when they perform in class.