Appendix 4: Assessment Schedule Speaking/Writing Goal 1: To improve learners score in the speaking paper by half a band.

General Overview of the Speaking Assessment Part of the course:

The formative testing dimension of the course was primarily done informally and directly. As far as the formative tests are concerned, I have been able to source a more than sufficient amount in published materials. This was done in order to ensure a certain amount of content validity. Where an appropriate (or topical) published test material could not be found, I developed my own ones based upon published past questions, these can be seen in the worksheets in appendix 8.

However, as I want to increase the face validity as much as possible for the summative test and owning to the fact that I was unable to find sufficiently realistic IELTS speaking exams in both course books and practice test materials, I again decided to create my own. This can be seen in appendix 6 below.

I chose to use criterion-referenced scoring in the summative test to make it as realistic as possible. Plat and Webber (1990) defines this as a test which measures a students performance according to a particular standard or criterion which has been agreed upon. The student must reach this level of performance to pass the test. To this end, the public versions of the IELTS speaking band descriptors were used. These were obtained from http://www.ielts.org/pdf/Speaking%20Band%20descriptors.pdf. The tests were recorded and doubled-marked by a colleague at EIU, who also happens to be an IELTS examiner, in order to minimize subjectivity and increase reliability, which Hughes (1989:29) describes as the likelihood of a student achieving the same result on any given occasion.

The students already have copies of the public versions of the band descriptors and had practice applying them to dummy candidates. I used this lesson https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingresources/resourcedetails?resId=6107 from the Cambridge English Teacher Support website. Therefore, they will already had practice applying the band descriptors to both themselves and other students. This will mean that they will be able to giv more realistic feedback to their partners during the informal

formative testing.

Lesson 1

Objective G1O1 To be better able to maintain a flow of speech and give more extensive answers in Part 1

Formative Assessment and notes This will be conducted informally and directly in class. (See green test notes boxes in the course plan for details.)

G1O2 To be able to plan more effectively for the long turn (part 2) and to be able to use the one minute planning time to brainstorm noncommon lexis & grammar and base their speech on these

This will be assessed directly in class (See test notes for lesson 2) and indirectly throughout the course as it is hoped that the more effective use of planning time by concentrating on coming up with 10 words of noncommon lexis will have a positive effectively on not only their fluency and coherence scores but also on the lexical resource mark.

G103 To be better able to use repair & clarification strategies

This will not be tested formally in class. However, it is hoped that an increase in their strategic competence will have a positive impact on their subsequent fluency and coherence scores. Same as above G1O3.

G1O4 To be better to use strategies for dealing with hesitation

G1O5 To produce syllable-final consonants, word stress in multisyllabic words, stresstimed intonation and chunking more accurately.

This will be tested indirectly and informally in class through the answering of a part 2 question.

G1O6 To produce regular past tenses more accurately

This will be tested indirectly and informally in class through the answering of a part 2 question requiring a lot of examples of the regular past simple.

Summative assessment (Speaking) and notes: This will involve a fully timed and recorded test using the materials in appendix 6. As outlined above, the tests will be marked using the public versions of the assessment criteria and be double marked to maximise reliability. It will take place at the end of the speaking course as detailed in the course plan.

Goal 2: To improve the learners score in both task 1 and task 2 of the IELTS writing paper (Move them up by a half a band score)
General Overview of the Writing Assessment Part of the course:

All of the tests, both formative and summative, are either taken from past papers books, published IELTS teachers resources or course books or very closely based upon published past papers, which will mean that they will have a higher content validity than if I had created them myself. The tests content validity will be further enhanced by the fact that will require the learners to perform the behaviour that is being measured (Brown 2003:22).

The tests will be criterion-referenced as per the live exam and marked using the public versions of the assessment criteria, namely task response/achievement, coherence and cohesion, grammatical range and accuracy and lexical resource, available at http://www.ielts.org/PDF/Writing%20Band%20descriptors%20Task%201.pdf & http://www.ielts.org/pdf/Writing%20Band%20descriptors%20Task%202.pdf.

Subjectivity is inevitable when it comes to marking writing (Harris/McCann 1994:55). This will be lowered as I am a newly trained up IELTS examiner, however, in order to ensure that subjectivity is kept to a minimum, I will get a sample of each of the students scripts doubled marked by a more experienced examiner in my department.

I will have to mark a large quantity of scripts over the period of the course and this may impinge upon my ability to mark consistently (Brown 2003:21). In spite of this, the large number of samples collected may positively impact on the overall reliability of the data collected.

The summative test, administered at the end of the course, will be taken from Cambridge IELTS past papers book 9 P 101 & 102. These can be seen in appendix X.

Lesson 7

Objective G2O7 To be better able to respond to the prompt

Specific Assessment Details and notes This will be tested directly, consisting of an informal writing in class. It will be timed to increase the realism of the test. However, they will only be given 30

minutes as the planning stage will have already been completed. Construct validity may be reduced as I am not only testing whether they can respond to the prompt but their writing ability in general. 8 G2O8 To be better able to use checklists and the error correction code as a way to notice errors and upgrade their own writing. 9 G2O9 To be better able to use a variety of complex sentences This will be tested indirectly throughout the rest of the course. They will not be required to proofread their scripts before they are handed in. However, those that do will see a positive impact in their scores, especially in the lexical resource and grammatical range and accuracy criteria. This will be assessed by an informal timed in class writing of a task 2 question taken from P.101 Cambridge IELTS practice tests 8. The face validity of the test will be impacted upon due to the fact that teacher support will be offered throughout. This will be tested directly and informally in class. Face validity will be increased by using Cambridge IELTS past papers Book 7.

10

G2O10 To be better able to present an overview which highlights main trends/ key features.

11

G2O11 To be able to paraphrase the prompt more effectively in task 1/2.

Tested directly and informally in class and indirectly throughout the whole course.

Summative Assessment (Writing) and notes: This will involve a fully timed test taken from Cambridge IELTS past papers book 9 p101. A copy of the test materials is given in appendix X. As outlined above, the tests will be marked using the public versions of the writing assessment criteria and be double marked to maximise reliability. It will take place at the end of the course as detailed in the course plan.