Thursday, November 17, 2011

Shohamy's Assessment

Harley et al did a study on whether grammar, discourse, and sociolinguistic competence are three separate entities.  Schachter's reactions:
"She argued that discourse should be defined more clearly as pragmatic knowledge, since discourse knowledge involves both cultural conventions and appropriate grammatical choices" (202).
I really like this description of what discourse should entail; that it's learning about culture as well as aspects about the language, such as grammar.  Something that connects these two is using idioms in communicating.  This involves understanding a bit about the culture, how they communicate, as well as grammatical structure. 

"Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether the small number of items chosen to test the discourse trait truly tested what the researches had assumed" (202). 
This quote illustrates how a test simply cannot accurately assess a language learner's discourse competency.  It further touches on how testing will not assess what is intended to assess, which therefore clouds the administrator's knowledge of the language learner's skills and knowledge of the language. 

I think that we simply need to come up with more creative ways to assess language learners because we cannot test communicative knowledge without inadvertantly testing grammar and syntax.  Similarly, if we are testing on grammar, we know that grammar in isolation is not always effective.  If we are using student writing to assess grammar, this involves sentence structure.  I think that this somewhat implies that we should be testing overall proficiency or several aspects in one test, but I think that this is also problematic.  I think that assigning writing, which involves several different genres of writing, and authentic situations such as bringing language learners into the community to use their oral language (speaking and listening) skills would involve several aspects within these assessments.  However, this might show that I really advocate for communicative competence as a goal for a language learner.  There are several ways to assess students based on different goals of language learners, what we are testing, and the teacher's views.  Therefore, in this abundance of different ways to assess language learners, there are many that could be considered "effective," or "accurate" based on what we are trying to assess.

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