Survey report by zoyirova feruza

Common areas of testing and assessment

The students were asked to indicate how often they encountered a number of common areas, or goals, of assessment. These areas represented two categories: firstly, more general and skill based competences, like listening and reading comprehension, oral production and interaction, written production; secondly, what could be characterized as a number of elements of, or prerequisites for, the skills in question, viz. vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. The former category reflects what in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is referred to as Reception, Interaction and Production. Furthermore, Mediation in the same document was touched upon through the inclusion of translation as one of the suggested areas of assessment. The language elements in the list are known from experience, as well as previous surveys, to be frequent targets of language assessment. Finally, the students were invited to add other matters, which they considered essential parts of their language assessment, and to indicate the frequency of those matters on the five-point scale. In this case as well, a distinction was made between formal testing and classroom assessment.

The students’ answers gave the following picture