Some Tools to Assess EFL Young Learners

Mohammed S. Alkhamali

2013

Twitter: @Alkhamali_M

As an EFL teacher for young learners, you need to use different assessment tools to make sure that these tools provide reliable and valid results. Using different tools helps you to distinguish the individual differences among your students and treat them accordingly. Variation in assessment tools helps also learners in, for instance, self-reflection, critical thinking, learning… Here are some assessment tools that, in my opinion, should be used in assessing EFL young learner.

Peer assessment: it helps in increasing the learners' in-class interaction. One of the young learners' characteristics is that they are competitive, this can be seen when a learner commits a mistake others are eager to correct him. This kind of assessment provides an extra space to practice English in the class. It also develops the critical thinking of learners. Teacher can expand in using peer assessment by letting learners assess each other's homework or exam sheet. Although it is a good way of assessment, teacher needs to set some rules to avoid aggressiveness or subjectivity between learners. For example,  the teacher replaces students' names on exam paper with numbers.

Writing: Teacher can assess his students based on any kind of their writings. These writings might be in form of quizzes, mind maps, group work sheets… they reflect learners abilities in understanding the writing rules such as direction and spelling. I try as possible as I can to avoid mentioning "written tests" as they would inhabit the young learners from learning the new language.

Observation: the teacher can set an interaction context that allow him observes the learners' usage of the FL. For example, working in pairs or in groups, allow teacher observing an authentic use of the FL. This helps teacher to distinguish the difficulties that his learners face in pronunciation, listening comprehension… etc.

As young learners get more older, the teacher can use different kinds of assessment tools such as:

Self-reflection: this type of assessment helps learners to build higher cognitive skills as the learner will critically think about his performance and work to improve it. The teacher can set some criteria to facilitate self-reflection at beginning. For instance, the teacher wants his learners to reflect on their writing paragraph, he then sets numbers of criteria such as starting with indentation, writing the topic sentence… etc. This will help students to realize the way of self-reflection.

Portfolio:  Let your students collect their works; work sheets, writings, photos… etc. and from time to time let them compare the development in their performance. This motivate learners to do their best. It also fulfill their competitive tendency. The learners can use the portfolio as an archive of their works to use it again and again.

 
You can see that in the most aforementioned assessment tools, learners play an essential role. That because I am heading to deliver the message that assessments can be used as a learning tool. you can judge your learners' performance through these tools without putting learners under stress of taking exams. These tools also supports self-learning, learners' autonomy.