The best and most effective ESL informal assessment tools for all four language domains – listening, speaking, reading and writing
Assessment of ESL student progress can be a tricky task. We have state and federal testing that we are responsible for but what about the daily, informal assessment?
In one of my previous blog posts, I talked in general about how to assess ESL students informally at different stages of their language learning.
In today’s blog post, I give a short overview of what guides our decisions where the students are at, what assessment is in general and ideas for ESL assessment. It is easy to get caught up in the everyday to-do lists just to realize at the end of the week or a month that what you thought the students were doing well in, is actually not true.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Before I dive into the actual activities you can use to monitor ESL student progress, I would like to go over Bloom’s Taxonomy – the pyramid that guides the instruction of every teacher.
It is structured in a way that the bottom is the lower level order thinking skills (LOTS) – remembering, comprehension – to higher order thinking skills (HOTS) – analysis, evaluation.
Without going too deep into each level, here is the gist of how Bloom’s taxonomy works in practice. The following comes from a blog post about Bloom’s Taxonomy by More Than English:
- We must remember a concept before we can understand it.
- We must understand a concept before we can apply it.
- We must be able to apply a concept before we analyze it.
- We must have analyzed the concept before we can evaluate it.
- We must have remembered, understood, applied, analyzed and evaluated a concept before we can create.
When it comes to teaching English learners – at any age – our goal is to make them understand what is going on in the classroom so we can then help them develop thinking skills in English.
As always, younger students are at a greater advantage simply because they have more time.
It gets progressively more difficult to keep up with the classwork in the older grades. For example, it takes major adaptation of material for a 9th grade ESL student to be able to answer comprehension and analytical questions from a reading. Not to mention merging all the newly learned concepts into a new product, like an essay.
What is assessment?
A simple definition says:
- Checking in to see how students are progressing: which ones are performing well and which ones are struggling.
And… you do it all the time! The thing is, we are constantly tracking our student progress. For example, a check-in question allows you to see whether the student knows what’s going in the classroom. A journal entry shared out individually or with a group gives you an idea of what writing areas you need to focus on.
There are two types of assessment.
The first one is informal, or formative.
Here are a few examples of informal assessment:
- On the spot opportunities (like the ones mentioned above)
- Authentic assessment (relevant to real-life)
- Performance-based (open-ended, without the only correct answer. Check THIS article for more information).
- Portfolio-type
The second one is summative.
Summative assessment is more formal. These are your unit or standardized tests. They allow the teachers and the school to track student progress as a whole (by school, class, etc). These assessments tend to follow academic trends.
Every day assessment of ESL students
Now that we have cleared up the terminology, let’s dive into what you can do every day to help you assess your ESL student progress.
These may be simple but they are powerful. A few of my favorites in any language domain are
- an exit ticket
- a quick check-in question for the class
- a self-evaluation vs. teacher evaluation (weekly)
- using a video
- rubrics
- interviews
Below you will find quick and effective ESL progress assessment activities.
How to assess listening
Listening and speaking are very closely related and it is easy to overlook assessment of just the listening skill. Nevertheless, checking in on listening gives you valuable information of what the students are actually able to hear in terms of phonics, vocabulary, sentence structure and instructions.
Here are a few ESL progress assessment activities you can employ right away:
- Dictation
- Cloze exercises
- Games (TPR -mimic, Bingo)
- Minimal pairs (tongue twisters, slap the word)
- Debate (for higher level students)
How to assess reading
There is a lot of reading done in school and many of the subject areas that our students are exposed to are already utilizing these activities to monitor student progress.
Here are a couple that can be easily adapted to your student’s language proficiency level and help them move up the Bloom’s scale.
- Journaling – reading response notebooks
- Drawing pictures
- Acting out (especially for beginners with lower level vocabulary)
- Open book assessments
- Interviews with partner
- Active reading/thinking
How to assess speaking
Because we use speaking to communicate, in an English speaking environment there may not be a specific need to assess this skills.
At the same time, may schools have begun placing high value on communication and have begun using oral assessments as part of their regular curriculum.
One of the most important tools in objective assessment of speaking are rubrics. The student should know what is expected of them before they begin.
Specific rubrics for English learners will help you zero in on a skill or performance that you are looking for and will bring more clarity to both your and students’ expectations.
Besides oration techniques, rubrics can focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar structure and more.
Here are a few other ways to assess student speaking:
- Interview with a partner
- Group discussion with each member contributing and one reporting out
- Creating a skit
- Creating a presentation
- Creating a video. I highly recommend flipgrid.com (you can watch the tutorial here)
How to assess writing
Last but not least is the writing assessment. Like speaking, writing is a productive skill. It is also the last to be mastered by English language learners.
A lot of factors need to come together for the students to be able to produce coherent writing. Therefore, constant modeling and encouragement are key.
What do we use to assess ESL writing? Similarly to speaking, rubrics come in handy in this language domain as well.
It is very important to teach a writing skill explicitly. Again, this is all about expectations and learning.
In addition to rubrics, some teachers and students like to create portfolios of student work. Saving students’ work (just the best writing samples is fine) allows both of you to sit down at the end of the school year, conference it out and celebrate the wonderful progress that the student made throughout the school year.
For ESL beginner activities and lesson The ESL Teaching Roadmap– a membership created specifically for middle and high school ESL teachers, who work with newcomers and mixed level classes.
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What is your go-to activity for assessment of ESL students? Share in the comments below!
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