3.

4 Evidence of Application of Theory to Practice in

AL 6962 Practicum II Assessment Project
A required component of AL 6962 is to assess our students learning. My assessment
project appears in Appendix D. It, along with the discussion in this paper, provides evidence that
I am learning how to apply my TESOL classroom learning to my work as an English teacher.
I worked under the direction of an experienced mentor teacher at Intercultural
Communications College (ICC) as a practice teacher for about 12 weeks. Among several
courses, I worked in an English Communication (EC) class. EC classes focus on learning and
using English in communicative ways. One feature of ICC is that it permits weekly new student
enrollment. That is, new students may come every Monday. The second feature is that classes are
small, so the teacher is able to take care of every student and manage the time easily compared to
a big class. Third, students has diverse goals, aims, and backgrounds of English. There were six
levels in the school, and I assessed high-intermediate listening and speaking class. There are
fourteen students who come from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Europe in the class.
The two charts below summarize student results on the assessment task. The left
side chart shows my ratings of the students performance. The right side chart shows student
self-evaluation scores after they completed the task. Eleven students completed the
assessment task, and their names are represented by letters A to K in these charts.
When I compared the test score and self-evaluation score, I found interesting results.
Before I graded the students, I thought there might not be much difference between
students actual scores and their self-evaluation scores because they were upper intermediate
level and quite aware of their English proficiency level. However, there was quite a range in
student self-assessments. One student, C, graded herself 7 points lower than I did, and three

other students also graded themselves somewhat lower than I did: F (4 points lower), G (3
points lower), and J (6 points lower).

The vertical line shows the score of the exam. The horizontal line shows the students.

I would like to research more specifically to investigate why and how students
evaluate themselves and which language feature graded differently than mine.
The eight charts and graphs shown below compare the students self-evaluation
scores with my assessments. There are some interesting points, but in general students
tended to grade themselves lower than I did. Half of the students graded themselves lower
for pronunciation and fluency even though they were doing well on the class exams. Student
C graded herself the lowest in the class. For example, she gave herself a 2 for pronunciation,
fluency, and vocabulary. Moreover, she also graded herself with a 3 for grammar, so it
seemed that she did not have much confidence about her English skills. Other factors that
may have caused her to give herself low self-evaluation include low number of questions
and format of questions.
More than half the students thought they paid attention to their grammar and
vocabulary on the exam task. On the other hand, it appeared they were not able to focus on
pronunciation and fluency because they were too focused on the grammar and vocabulary.

Score depends on the skills

Fluen
cy

Pronunciation
score
1
2
3
4
5

# of
students
0
0
0
3
8

Grammar (past perfect)

# of
score
students
1
0
2
0
3
3
4
4
5
4
selfevaluation
Pronuncia
tion
grade
1
2
3
4
5

Grammar
grade
1
2
3
3.5
4
5

# of students
0
1
5
4
1

# of students
0
0
3
1
3
4

score
1
2
3
4
5

# of students
0
0
3
6
2

Vocabulary
score
1
2
3
4
5

# of students
0
0
1
5
5

Fluen
cy
grade
1
2
3
4
5

# of students
0
1
5
3
2

Vocabulary
grade
# of
1
2
3
4
5

students
0
1
3
3
4

There were some differences between how students felt about their skills and the
grade I gave them. However, it is also important how students feel about their strong and
weak points in their English skills throughout the class. The tables below show how
students felt about their English speaking skills, specifically which language feature they
feel they have improved and which feature they still need to improve more.
Features that students improved in the class
I can speak fluently compared to before.
People understand what he/she wants to say even though there
are some mistakes.
better than before (using English every day)
nothing special
Lower points of students speaking
take time to use target grammar in the speaking
grammar
find the right vocabulary in the sentence
pronunciation
fluency
cant continue speaking in the same topic

Number of students
1
1
5
4
Number of students
3
3
3
3
2
1

More than half students felt their English skills improved compared to four weeks
earlier. However, only two students wrote specifically how they felt improvement of their
English compared to before. Four students did not write comments on it so they might not
be able to think they improve their English or they did not know how they improve their
English through the class. On the other hand, most students wrote comments about their
weak points of their English. Some of them found difficulties in using suitable grammar and
vocabulary in their speaking. Moreover, they also said they need more practice to speak
English. I was surprised about the comment because they always speak and practice their
speaking in the class. From the teachers perspective, when they had discussions in class,
they often could not stop speaking.
Through this project, I learned that it is good for teachers to know students actual
weakness as well as their opinions about their weaknesses so that they have the opportunity
to make suitable adjustments in the class objectives or content. For example, I might need to
focus on specific content or situations and let students practice more in the class. It might
also be beneficial to have students evaluate other and reflect on their abilities compared
with each other.
Reflections on the process and product of class during AL 6962
When I decided to evaluate grammar in speaking, I thought it would be easy to
evaluate students and students also would be able to understand the activities easily and
manage the situation well. However, it was really difficult define a specific situation that
would require students to use target sentence patterns in speaking even they understood the
pattern perfectly and we had practiced in class. This experience makes me realize that how
difficult to assess students speaking skills compared to other skills.

At the beginning of the class, I asked students to review the target sentence pattern
to match the cause-effect or problem- solution events and make sentences to describe them
with a past perfect verb form. Students understood and did this activity smoothly. Then, I
asked them to pantomime similar situations in front of the class and let the others write
down the situation and share their ideas with a partner. Next, I asked them to explain the
situation using the target sentence pattern. It went well when I asked students to write down
the situation first. After a few practices, I asked students to explain the situation and tell
their partners without writing. It took one hour to do this series of activities because I
wanted students to get used to speaking with the target sentence pattern. It was a little bit
difficult for students to understand the some of the activities, but I explained carefully and
pointed the objectives. They seemed to enjoy the lesson even though they felt embarrassed
to act in front of classmates. In the future, I will try to lessen embarrassment by assessing
students individually instead of in front of their classmates or by building similar activities
into my weekly routine to make them more familiar.
Finally, I asked students to explain the situations in a picture using the target past
perfect sentence pattern. I thought the order of the activities was good to let students focus
on the assessment objective gradually and understand the situation easily. I was focused on
how students used the target expression in their speaking, so I gave some examples of the
action and made sure of the order of the pictures for each situation. I asked my mentor
teacher to evaluate students, and we compared our grades after finishing the exam. Interrater reliability was good. When we had different grades, we discussed them with each other
and decided the grades of students. It was good to make students self-evaluation sheet
because me know how students felt about their English, and it also helped me think about

how to improve similar lessons in the future. It might be better, for example, to make more
specific questions for the self-evaluation sheet, to be more aware of students problems, to
and make effective lesson plan in the future.
Reflections on the process and product of assessment during AL 7099
When I review my test and assessment experience from my practicum a semester later, I
see there are still some good points and some improvement points to consider for the future.
Reviewing target language expressions before taking an exam is effective for students to
realize how much they understand the target feature or not. In my class, I did about one hour of
grammar review and activities. It also helped to make a comfortable classroom environment for
students because they understand the target points and felt relaxed about their exam.
Asking students to write their self-evaluation is good for a teacher to know how students
feel about their skills and how they would like to improve in the future. I was able to see
differences in how students felt about their English skills even though their scores were similar
and good. If I make questions to ask about what they want to do to improve their skills, selfevaluation will be more meaningful and I will be able to prepare effective lessons which reflect
students opinions. I still need to work on making productive self-evaluations.
There are several areas of improvement that I can make in my test and assessment. When
I made my speaking exam, I focused on students use of the past perfect tense. It can be said that
I made a mismatch in my task because this verb form is more frequently used in academic
writing than in speaking. My assessment task can be completed with simple past tense verbs as
well as the past perfect. My exam has a low validity because the assessment is different from the
class objectives which focus on listening and speaking skills. One solution for this problem is to
use this sentence pattern for assessing listening skills and have students guess the situation.

How I do speaking exams and assess students can also be improved. For example, I only
gave one speaking item to each student. It can be said that the test has low reliable because
students only had one chance to answer a question. The answer might vary depending on the
situation and environment such as students feeling, date, and climate. Additionally, I asked
students to answer the question in front of other classmates. It may have been embarrassing, and
some students were able to listen to how other students answered the question and get some clues
through the conversation. It is good for students to take exams in a comfortable situation, but it is
also can be said my exam had low reliability. When I try to resolve those situations in the future,
I should give three or four question items for each students and test them privately so they are
assessed equally from several speaking samples without the feeling of a formal speaking event.
Regarding the rubric that I used for my assessment, I should have revised the details in
some of the descriptors because they were not always clear. For example, I use the phrases
frequent errors in one category and many errors in another. It might be better to show
percentages of misunderstanding or use other words to show the difference clearly. I also used a
rubric and gave my students points for fluency, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, but I
did not have a good enough sample of speech for making such judgements since each student
produced only one sentence. My assessment was not reliable indicator of whether students had
mastered all of the points on my rubric.
Planning and implementing this small oral proficiency quiz showed me how complex
assessment issues are. I have learned a lot about assessment from this project in AL 6962
Practicum II in TESOL and from AL 6730 Assessment in Language Teaching. Now, I have a
better understanding now of how to make tests more valid and reliable than I did before. At the
same time, I still have a lot to learn.