139 research outputs found
Integrating the Formative and Summative Post Covid-19 in a Blended Learning Approach to Higher Educational Assessment
Full text linkThe response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, reflecting a general move towards remote working, has been overwhelmingly one of turning to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) described as a “temporary solution to an immediate problem” (Bozkurt and Sharma 2020, ii). ERT is often seen from a negative viewpoint, linked to a reactive approach to teaching (Golden 2020; Murphy 2020) with a lack of planning or expertise. This means of delivery, however, has also taught us many lessons, some of which may provide us with new opportunities and ways of working in the future (Hodges et al. 2020; Hartle 2020; Thomas et al. 2021). When considering the assessment of language competence one of these lessons is that formative assessment is more appropriate to asynchronous, online contexts and summative assessment is suited rather to the synchronous, face to face spaces. In Higher Education (HE) contexts in the past summative assessment has generally been conducted in person, in a physical context because of concerns related to exam security (Nusche 2008; Pachler et al. 2010). The challenge now, where online teaching is increasingly becoming part and parcel of the educational repertoire, however, is to integrate both the formative and the summative in a new form of blended learning (BL) for the future. This is a future where the approach to teaching in online digital contexts both synchronously and asynchronously will no longer be ERT but a principled, planned approach to combining the digital with the traditional
Listening to lessons learned from lockdown: catering for the insights of individual participant voices analyzed particularly through poetic inquiry
No full textThe article focuses on English language university students and a pilot study undertaken at the University of Verona to investigate changing study strategies during the pandemic. This article will present key findings from the study. We begin with a brief summary of the frequency analysis of two questionnaire answers, which has been more amply described elsewhere (Hartle 2022), but our main focus is a qualitative analysis of poems constructed from three participant transcripts of open answers on the same question naire. This slightly unusual approach, known as PI, is an emergent arts-based method ology (Vincent 2018). In this approach the use of poetry reveals the participants’ words and thoughts, and, indeed, arts-based methodologies are often employed in the social sciences to give voice to the disenfranchised. The underlying, themes provide insights that are at times surprising and may shed light on factors such as space, time and hu man relationships, which are not always explicitly expressed when focusing on study. Finally, we suggest some practical implications for teachers and materials developers
From the heart of the expanding circle
No full textThis articles asks the question of how to apply the teaching of English as a foreign language with an eye to the developments due to the spread of English as a Lingua Franca. Is English as a Lingua Franca a cimmunity of use or can it be codified and taught as a language in its own right? The author suggests that a native speaker model is still required for the teaching stage
Students who don't want to write
No full textThis article explores the problems related to learners' unwillingness to do written work in class. By presenting the written work as part of an integrated skills approach writing can become motivating for learners who can use it in a task-based context to communicate meanings to their peers. The author provides examples from her own classroom experience.
TEASIG webinars and Facebook discussions
No full textThis article describes the ways in which the popular webinars organised by IATEFL TEASIG, where speaker from the field of ELT assessment provide one hour webinars on various topics, can be extended by means of social media facilitated discussions. A specific example is provided to illustrate this phenomenon, which the author believes to be an effective way of extending the conversation beyond the constraints of the formal webinar, providing participants with a familiar context in which they can voice their own ideas and ask the speaker further questions, sharing insights and resources
What level are you?
No full textThis article approaches the question of how language competence levels are not necessarily constant and may vary according to a whole range of factors. it then asks how fair it is to establish a level as a point on a scale assessed by means of summative performance testing. The author suggests that continuous assessment may be a fairer system and illustrates this from her own classroom
From learner corpus to data-driven learning (DDL) in EAP writing. Improving lexical usage in academic writing
No full textDespite considerable discussion in the literature (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Hyland, 1998; Tang, 2012) competent English academic writing is still a problem which needs to be solved. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching often focuses on specialized lexis, which may, however, be the area where academic writers need least help. The study of a small corpus of C2 level academic writing which consisted of the sub-genres of summary and discussion writing revealed that one key area which is problematic is collocation. This paper presents the results of this small corpus investigation into learner language and how it informed the classroom implementation of data-driven learning (DDL) to increase learner awareness of and ability to use collocations effectively in written academic English. The article briefly describes the corpus and the resulting teaching procedure adopted. The first step of this procedure is familiarization followed by experimentation using Sketch Engine (SkeLL)
Combining formative and summative practices in higher education ELT: Implementing learning-oriented assessment
No full textProponents of educational reform frequently call for ‘higher standards’ but in their influential article, Black and Wiliam (1998) point out that national reforms worldwide fail as ‘the sum of all these reforms has not added up to an effective policy because something is missing’ (1998:140): a focus on what actually happens in the classroom and how learning is managed. Classrooms have changed since 1998, but there is still a tendency for reformers to call for higher standards and better exam results without clearly explaining how to achieve them. This puts pressure on teachers, who already face time, administrative and curriculum constraints, to take responsibility for managing assessment processes while also promoting learning in the classroom. The primary aim of this article is to describe ways in which assessment tools, ranging from summative to formative assessment, can be combined systematically to promote learning as well as measuring achievement, with a particular emphasis on how formative assessment can aid learning and ultimately benefit learners in summative tests. This is illustrated by the system applied on the English for Professional Purposes (EPP) course, ‘English for the World of Work’ at Verona University. This is a postgraduate course, designed and implemented by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Verona University, to form a bridge between the theoretical studies of language undertaken at the university and the more practical language skills required in the workplace (for a full description see Hartle 2018b). Although this is not a General English course, the assessment tools used can also easily be extended to school courses teaching professional English or General English
Book Review: A Key to English by Brian Yorke Deakin
No full textThis review of Brian Yorke Deakin's book 'A Key to English' highlights in particular the novel approach of this writer to the study of the language by means of humour
The Quality lies in the Blend: a digital, task based approach to Professional English
No full textLe tecnologie dell’informazione e della comunicazione (TIC) non sono oggi una novità né nella vita quotidiana né nella didattica delle lingue. Semmai oggi nell’insegnamento delle lingue è importante capire come le TIC possano combinarsi con le strategie didattiche di ieri, in che misura esse possano venire incontro ai diversi stili di apprendimento, come siano compatibili con l’interazione faccia-a-faccia e come, in ultima analisi, possano migliorare la qualità dell’insegnamento e dell’apprendimento. Ciò allo scopo di evitare che un loro uso non informato – si prenda, per esempio, il caso della visione di un video – porti a risultati deludenti a causa di sfide troppo alte in quanto non mediate né sostenute da un’efficace impalcatura didattica. Il contributo presenta un approccio ‘blended’, basato sul ‘compito’ (task-based) e sull’uso consapevole degli strumenti tecnologici con studenti universitari in un corso di perfezionamento della lingua inglese per il mondo del lavoro, facilmente estensibile ad altri contesti; e vuole dimostrare come esso abbia favorito il trasferimento di attività avviate nel mondo protetto dell’aula ad attività comunicative autentiche realizzate fuori dall’aula, nel mondo esterno
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