Informal assessment

Harris and MacCann first draw us to informal assessment. The positive aspects of it is that we are able to measure the student advance in a relax atmosphere and many times we can have surprises, because some students express better informally than on a test, when they feel comfortable it could be within a “friends” talk or in a game. However it should never replace formal testing because we can only make an informal test to some students on a classroom not all of them, and of course if we want the students to feel free to talk we need to be careful about the mistakes they make, it depends on the teacher, how he/she correct the mistakes (I rather make notes and make a review of general mistakes of the group at the next class or have an individual feedback after class to a student in particular of course respecting the student privacy and not putting him on the spot).

How often a teacher uses informal assessment depends only on her/him although if it’s a well observer he/she can make this kind of assessment even when students are participating ether orally, written or when reading. We should be careful and not base our assessment on mere rough impressions or favoritism. This can be done in or out of the classroom we can create opportunities or necessities to the students so they have to use the language in a fan and attractive way.


The weighting we give to each area of the language can vary as the school or student needs for example there are several schools that focus mostly on speaking or in reading/writing grammar (I think that’s not correct because the student is having only the language in part and even if he/she needs an specific area at the moment sooner or later he/she is going to need the all the skills, in other words why should we teach only part of the language when the student can lean all of it) however in some units from the curse we are giving the information is focus in a specific part of the curse and we should grade according to what we teach. All in all assessment weighting will depend on our needs and information involved.

I think that a teacher should take in consideration everything to notice if a student is showing some progress and when you are in the class and you see the minimum advancement in a child (well I personally teach children) you feel so proud of him/her and its really noticeable just by the look in the eyes, that’s what really make motivate me to keep going. But in this reading we are talking about a qualitative and quantitative measurement and not just to notice the student advancement bt give them a grade in base on it and when we talk about informal testing we are talking about take in consideration this assessment to give grades, which is hard if we don’t have very clear what we are taking in consideration, we need to be really specific inhere otherwise we could be in serious trouble when we give grades to students and when they ask reasons about the grades; this can be applied in all four skills reading, writing, listening and speaking.

In order to have the appropriate assessment grades both qualitative and quantitative we need to be careful and include in our lesson planning a specific day or activity in the week that we can use to grade our students informally this way we will have four different informal tests that we can use to complement our monthly or bimonthly formal test and with the correct feedback each week we can advance more in our program and when we receive the surprise that we must give grades ahead on the due date we don’t have to worry that much we just take in consideration the informal tests (I don’t mean that all the times we can do this, it’s only for an emergency).

Introduction to chapter 1 Harris, M and McCann P. (1994) Assessment. Hong Kong: Macmillan Publishers.