Appreciation of Teaching Assessment on the Criterion of New English course

（英语新课标教学评价之解读）<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Shenzhen Experimental School   Wang Guangzhao

    With the global economic integration it’s more obvious that foreign languages have great effect upon all the aspects of human life. Therefore it’s the essential demand for the civilian competence in the new century to learn and grasp a foreign language. It’s based on this case and requirements of our nation’s educational guideline that the state earnestly advocates and pushes the new criterion of English course in order to pay great attention to foster the innovative spirit and practical ability of the students. The reform of the curriculum standard aims at fostering their innovative spirit and practical ability, forming the effective study strategies and establishing the basis for their sustainable development, which is not merely the logical jumping-off of English teaching and quality standard but also its eternal end-result. It’s no doubt that scientific and effective teaching assessment is the important means by which people can check whether the aim is well realized.

    I. The background and gist of teaching assessment

The new criterion of English course not only represents the developing trend of foreign language teaching in modern times, but coagulates the latest achievement in the research on . foreign language teaching in our country. It advocates the Learning-Centered Education, the  token of which is Task-based Language Teaching. This kind of educational notion lays importance on learning and meeting the real demands of the students. Its supreme aim is to train the students as clear and effective communicators, self-guiding life-long learners, creative problem-solvers,  responsible and participant citizens, cooperative and excellent workers and integrative thinkers full of information. David Nunan (1999) said, “Knowledge of grammatical structures was no guarantee of being able to use those rules for communication. Learners who were able to identify instances of rule violation, and who could even state the rule, frequently violated the  rules when using language for communication.”  A task is a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward. The task-based approach aims at providing opportunities for the learners to experiment with and explore both spoken and written language through learning activities which are designed to engage learners in the authentic, practical and functional use of language for meaningful purposes. 

To carry through the scientific teaching assessment such problems are particularly emphasized first. 1. Erecting the educational view on foreign languages according with the spirit of quality education. 2. Dealing with the relation between linguistry and language application perfectly. 3. Integrative application of listening, speaking ,reading and writing, emphasizing particularly on fostering the reading ability. 4. Using English to the best of our abilities while utilizing our native language properly. 5. Dealing with the relation between language and culture well. 6. Establishing the subjective position of the students while exerting the guide function of teachers. 7. Heightening the quality of classroom teaching and carrying out the extra-curriculum activity positively. 8. Making good use of modern teaching approaches and widely using and developing all sorts of educational resources. Nowadays the training of the students’ ability of learning independently has been the touchstone to check the effect of English teaching and the competence of the students’ sustainable development. Knowing about these issues above fully is the basis and key to comprehend the teaching assessment on the criterion of new English course.

II. The position, character and ways of teaching assessment

The teaching evaluation is the key tache in the criterion of new English course. This is why the experts change the terms as exam and check in the old teaching syllabus into curriculum assessment. To be exact, curriculum assessment should contain the evaluations towards the students, teachers and the school, the first of which is the most important. Personally, the character of evaluation lies in obtaining the feedback of teaching, monitoring the teaching quality, revising and guiding our teaching. Its evaluative target is to stress on the human-based idea, facilitate the all-round development of the educatees, promote the teachers to improve their teaching and accelerate the development of English teaching. The criterion of new English course puts forward such evaluating modes as self assessment, group assessment, teacher assessment and expert assessment, which make the routine teaching evaluation more scientific and humanistic. In the past, people used to say turkey to one and bazzard to another between the formative assessment and the summative assessment but now the new criterion thinks much of the organic combination of the two. As a matter of fact, the latter one remains the key method of teaching evaluation. The formative assessment is an important component and impulsing factor of teaching, the task of which is to carry on assessment of the behavior of the students in the course of their daily study, the progress they ‘ve made and the development reflected on their emotion, attitude, strategies, etc. The so-called summative assessment means the evaluation on the learning results of the students, which emphasizes particularly on.the seeing about the ability of using English practically. Its main form is the examination including listening test, written test and oral test. The examinations can be classified into two types: good-sized tests such as NMT(National Matriculation Test), graduating test, midyear and minitype tests like semester test, unit test. The new course criterion specially encourages all the schools especially those in coastal developed cities to create conditions actively to increase oral test. The principles of designing test questions are to decrease the pure grammatical questions and play down the difficulty of grammatical questions in the light of the new teaching outline, lay stress on. Intercommunication, give prominence to passages, increase the test questions with language settings and reduce objective questions properly. Meanwhile，the evaluating principles are not to be sneezed at in the criterion of new English course，such as the invigorative principle，the principle of participation，the principle of stressing on formative assessment and the principle of activity. The following problems should be paid attention to in the practical teaching assessment: 1. Embodying the subjective position of the students during the assessment. 2. Emphasizing upon the function of the formative assessment in the development of the students. 3. Paying more attention to the diversity and flexibility of the evaluating methods. 4. Thinking much of the feedback function of the evaluating results towards teaching. 5. The summative assessment must attach importance to checking the ability of using English synthetically of the students. 6. Adverting in dealing with the relation between teaching and assessment properly. 7. Carrying out all levels of assessment according to the course targets. 8. Keeping the intimacy towards the assessing results. 8. Embodying the different characteristics of electives and required courses in the assessment. 9. Paying more attention to the actual effect and utilizing the assessing means rationally and correctly.

    III. The evaluative feature and the evaluating mode

Individual-wise, assessment is to check the performance of one’s teaching. The so-called performance means the contribution(s) of the individual, colony or organization in realizing the  aims of an organization. The evaluative feature possibly contains many aspects. The views of different experts are more or less different in the aspect of performance. Steven P. Robins pointed out (1977) , the checking of assessment should contain the results of tasks, behaviour in the procedure and the character of the procedure. And the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />US administrative expert John Daniels thought the working quality, amount and attitude, the expressive skills, creativity, independence, operation knowledge and intercommunicative ability ought to be thought of attentively. But a study of London Income Data Service (1989) shows that the following elements are thought most over in the assessment: (1) the knowledge, ability and technique concerned with your job; (2) the working attitude shown in the zest, sense of responsibility, motivation, etc. (3) the quality of considering your work combining with details during a certain time span; (4) the output of production; (5) the interaction reflected in the intercommunication with other members of the team. It’s certain that such guide lines of performance checking in homework as performance, attitude , ability and cooperation should also be considered. In reality these guide lines ought to be decomposed further in checking a teacher’s performance as follows: performance including the amount of working and teaching effect; attitude including rate of attendance, teaching attitude and imparting knowledge and educating people; ability including professional competence, teaching innovation and the difficulty of curriculum itself ; cooperation including administration of teaching and research office, guiding new teachers and helping other teachers.

In my view it’s a better approach to apply assessment effectively according to the procedures of the following chart.

                    Checking of personal performance

                         ↓                       ↓

                Checking design              Evaluating design 

                      ↓                              ↓  

index design →scale design →mode design ←index design→scale design ←method   ↓                         ↓             ↓

                           performance check→performance assessment←applying norms 

↓

                           applying assessment 

   Supposing that the chart above is applied correctly and makes good effect, the further tendency will be like what the other chart shows.

                                        Teaching assessment

                 Progress chart of teaching quality through assessment