Creating Authentic Assessments

Every teacher has a go-to approach to evaluating students' progress. Whether it’s through formal testing or taking the time for conversations with students, each method tests a different area of students’ English skills, such as their ability to form correct grammatical forms or their confidence in speaking.

In any assessment of English, it’s always good to bear in mind the purpose of the evaluation. In many cases it will be to make sure students are ready for a formal test or exam. Another reason, however, is to know whether students can actually function in English, getting on with their lives in the language and interacting well with others. In this respect, speaking a foreign language isn’t like other skills, as sometimes being wrong might be good enough, and can even be helpful for learning.

Let’s take an example. The biggest dread for every language learner is the novel situation. It might be something as ordinary making small talk with a very chatty hairdresser, or it might be dramatic, like asking a receptionist for help with a burst pipe in a hotel room. For many students, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to form correct grammatical sentences in either of these situations. What might come out may be something like ‘Yes, much traffic today’, or ‘You come, help, water on floor.’ Although not correct, they’re likely to be understood and get the result the student wants. What’s more, it's likely that the person they are speaking to, when they try to make sense of what the student is trying to say will clarify their meaning by repeating it back to them in correct English, making the conversation an opportunity to fill in a gap in the student’s English.

This makes it important that the ability to use English spontaneously is tested, which is where authentic assessments come in. Although you may not be able to create the authenticity of the real world in your classroom, you can at least try and aim to recreate its unpredictability.

It might sound like a contradiction to ask students to prepare for something they don’t expect, there are plenty of useful assessment methods which simulate authentic situations and help students to think on their feet, respond to unexpected events and not be afraid of making mistakes as long as they can get their message across.

Here are a few things to bear in mind when choosing an authentic assessment method.

Firstly, in an authentic assessment, you’re not asking students to be perfect. Instead, you’re looking for things like effectiveness of getting a message across, and the ability to think quickly and improvise to adapt what they already know to new scenarios. Mistakes are fine, and might even demonstrate that students are thinking imaginatively with the language they have.

To get students in the mood for making mistakes, make sure you do warm ups. Improv Encyclopaedia has a great list of creative ideas for warmups and ice breakers that can be adapted to the English classroom.

Once students are warmed up, try to make sure the assessment is something they might do in the real world. Obviously this will depend on the level and personal preferences of students, but common examples might include:

·       Doing a role play in which they complain in a shop about a broken product, and they do not have all of the vocabulary needed to describe their problem. This is a very common situation students might find themselves in if they ever spend a significant amount of time in an English-speaking country.

·       Creating a short video for social media, and then responding to the comments people leave on it. If you don’t want students to post directly on social media, you can have different classroom groups comment on each other’s videos. Replying to random comments on social media is a great way to practise spontaneity, and also brings in humour and different formality levels into play.

·       Have students present their most recent assignment in one of their other school subject to the rest of the class, and instruct the class that everyone must ask one question about the presentation. This is something that students might have to do if they do higher-level study overseas.

As you can see, the possibilities for authentic assessments are endless, but in all cases, you’re looking for communication and quick thinking, rather than linguistic accuracy. We hope this article has sparked some ideas for you, and please let us know if you have any great tips and hacks for authentic assessments!