Podcast 2

The podcast discusses the differences between assessment and evaluation in English language education. Assessment focuses on specific language points, while evaluation looks at overall language skills. Formative assessment tracks student progress, using tools like observation and checklists. Summative assessment measures what students have learned, using tests or projects. The principles of practicality and authenticity are important in language assessment. The speaker shares a personal experience with subjective and objective tests, expressing a preference for objective tests as they help students remember vocabulary. Hello, my name is Annette. Welcome to this podcast from UNET. Today, this episode talks about an interesting information related to the book called Fundamentals of English Language Assessment for Primary Schools by Saida Mendes. In Chapter 1, page 5, Mendes mentions the differences of assessment and evaluation. The first difference is assessment in form and evaluation report. Other difference is that assessment focuses on specific points of language while evaluation emphasizes overall aspects of language. Also, the teacher works assessment during the learning process while evaluation plays at the end of the term. Now, I'm talking about the concept of formative and summative assessment. Regarding to Mendes, in page 10, formative assessment is to get information about the student's progress. Here, the teachers can work with instruments like observation, rubrics, and checklist. On the other hand, summative assessment provides information in relation to what the students know such as the ending of a unit. Here, the teachers can use homework, tests, or projects. To amplify the idea of the principles of language assessment, I would like to explain two of them. The first one is practicality. This principle, from my personal point of view, the teacher should be able to develop, administer, and market within the available time and resource. The second one is authenticity. This principle is important because we need to include topics interesting and relevant, including tasks similar to the real world. To finalize this podcast, I would like to share an experience in high school related to subjective and objective tests. I was doing an oral interview, and the teacher told me that I could choose one topic from the three that she had in the document. But I didn't have much knowledge of that three topics, and I couldn't express myself. And at the end, I got a bad grade. For this reason, I think that objective tests are more appropriate to assist young learners because they can see the answer in the test, because some examples of the test items are true and false, matching or multiple choice, and others. I think this is better for the students to remember their vocabulary and study it. Thank you so much, and see you in the next episode. Bye.