Tandem MOOC english

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What is assessment and what does it serve?

We can imagine assessment as telling a biography: with assessment, in fact, the teacher reconstructs the identity of the student based on his or her linguistic competence (= what the student can do with the language).

In language teaching, in fact, assessment is a continuous process of collecting and analysing data on students' linguistic knowledge. 

Assessment serves to:

• understand students' competences. If we understand students' skills, we can help them improve.
• measure a student's performance on a particular task. In this way, we understand more precisely what the students' competences are. In this case, assessment can take different forms (tests, quizzes, interviews, portfolios, etc.).
• better understand the students' learning process. Consequently, it allows teachers to correct possible errors and improves their teaching choices. If the teacher asks a class to do a task and the whole class has difficulties, it is very likely that the teacher needs to change something in his or her teaching. If the evaluation is positive, it means that the task was effective and helped the students to improve.