ESPSIG & TEASIG: Content or language - do you know which one you're assessing?

Join the IATEFL English for Specific Purposes SIG and the IATEFL Testing, Evaluation & Assessment SIG and Ildiko Porter-Szucs, Ph.D for this joint webinar.

The fifth of TESOL's six principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners states the need to monitor and assess student language development. Assessing language alone can present enough of a challenge if it is to be done well, not to mention when the learners’ subject-matter mastery also needs to be assessed. Yet increasingly teachers in various second- and foreign-language contexts – e.g., ESP, CLIL, EMI – are called on to do just that. In this interactive presentation, after briefly touching on essential concepts such as construct and construct-irrelevant variance, we explore the extent to which it is possible to assess content without language. We analyze items, tasks, and rating scales that purport to do one or the other and examine how they can be improved. Time is reserved at the end of the presentation for a summary of best practices and questions.

Ildiko (Ildi) Porter-Szucs, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of ESL/TESOL at Eastern Michigan University. She is former President of the Michigan Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (MITESOL). Her scholarship over the last twenty years has covered a broad spectrum of topics, including teacher formation, pedagogy and methodology, pronunciation, formulaic language, and language assessment. She is currently co-authoring a textbook on assessment for pre- and in-service language teachers with a working title of How Do You Know That Your Students Are Learning: A Practical Guide to Language Assessment.

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