Reading assessment

I really liked Chapter 9 in our book. It had a lot of good ways to assess and test reading skills. I think you definitely need to use a variety of different methods in order to get a true comprehension of what is going on with each student. And also a lot of experience. Teachers who have been teaching for a while have, hopefully, developed the skills and instincts necessary to assess and understand where their students are in their knowledge. However for a beginning teacher it is all a great big mystery and any tools you can find that will help you are going to be beneficial in making you the best and most effective teacher you can be. Having these basic tools will definitely make me aware of what can be done to assess students and make me feel a bit more confident in my abilities to accurately assess them.

As for writing tests, I know that it can be hard. Trying to phrase a question that will adequately test the student's knowledge without being too confusing or too easy is a fine line to walk. Just in trying to create three choices for an idiom every day at work for my co-workers is stressful enough for me. I can imagine how difficult it would be to have to create a whole test! And already my co-workers are asking me if I'm going to test them on these idioms. I can also see where it may be easy to get misdirected in writing your test questions so that you aren't testing the right thing, i.e. what the students have been learning. And doing this for ESL students will be even harder when they don't have the basic language skills to let you know that your test isn't appropriate.