This book provides teachers with an entirely new approach to developing and using classroom-based language assessments. This approach is based on current theory and practice in the field of language assessment and on an understanding of the assessment needs of classroom teachers. The following key questions are addressed: • Why do I need to assess? What beneficial consequences do I want to help bring about? How can my assessments help my students learn better and help me improve my teaching? • When and how often do I need to assess? What decisions do I need to make to help bring about these beneficial consequences? • What do I need to assess? How can I define the abilities that I want to assess? • How can I assess my students? What kinds of assessment tasks should I create? How can I score my students’ responses to these tasks? The authors guide the reader step-by-step through the process of developing and using classroom-based assessments with clear explanations and definitions of key terms, illustrative examples, and activities for applying the approach in practice. Extra resources are available on the website: www.oup.com/elt/teacher/lact Lyle Bachman is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He serves as a consultant in language testing research projects and in developing language assessments for universities and government agencies around the world, and he conducts courses and training workshops in language assessment. Barbara Damböck was Director of Studies of the English Department at the Teacher Training Academy in Dillingen, Germany, from 2003 to 2011. From 2003 to 2017 she supervised the training of oral examiners for the certification examination for elementary school English teachers in Bavaria. She has extensive experience as a classroom teacher, teacher trainer, and teacher of teacher trainers. She conducts courses and workshops for teachers and teacher trainers around the world.

This book makes a unique contribution to classroom assessment literature, linking teacher-friendly examples to scholarly work and current research in the field, and providing comprehensive, hands-on information on core concepts in accessible terms. Examples of real activities and questions for reflection and discussion aim to enrich understanding.

Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices is designed to offer a comprehensive survey of essential principles and tools for second language assessment. Its first and second editions have been successfully used in teacher-training courses, teacher certification curricula, and TESOL master of arts programs. As the third in a trilogy of teacher education textbooks, it is designed to follow H. Douglas Brown's other two books, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (sixth edition, Pearson Education, 2014) and Teaching by Principles(fourth edition, Pearson Education, 2015). References to those two books are made throughout the current book. Language Assessment features uncomplicated prose and a systematic, spiraling organization. Concepts are introduced with practical examples, understandable explanations, and succinct references to supportive research. The research literature on language assessment can be quite complex and assume that readers have technical knowledge and experience in testing. By the end of Language Assessment, however, readers will have gained access to this not-so-frightening field. They will have a working knowledge of a number of useful, fundamental principles of assessment and will have applied those principles to practical classroom contexts. They will also have acquired a storehouse of useful tools for evaluating and designing practical, effective assessment techniques for their classrooms.

This book focuses where assessment has greatest relevance—the classroom. A great deal of research related to assessment is focused on ‘the testing industry’, high-stakes language proficiency testing, and related analytical and statistical reports that are far removed from teachers’ and students’ experiences in the classroom. Recently, more attention has been paid to assessment in language classrooms and the many challenges that teachers face in both measuring and promoting student learning. This book contributes to the body of knowledge related to teacher assessment competence, and how it is manifested in the decisions they make about assessment procedures and instruments in their classes. Focused on specific challenges related to classroom assessment, each chapter reports on particular assessment issues faced by teachers, their choices regarding such issues, and the consequences (actual or anticipated) of their decision-making. This book will interest the thousands of teachers globally dealing with the numerous challenges associated with effective classroom assessment in language learning. This collection of teacher voices, stories, and investigations provides possible solutions to such challenges, and will serve to promote assessment literacy in the language teaching profession.

The evaluation of student performance and knowledge is a critical element of an educator’s job as well as an essential step in the learning process for students. The quality and effectiveness of the evaluations given by educators are impacted by their ability to create and use reliable and valuable evaluations to facilitate and communicate student learning. The Handbook of Research on Assessment Literacy and Teacher-Made Testing in the Language Classroom is an essential reference source that discusses effective language assessment and educator roles in evaluation design. Featuring research on topics such as course learning outcomes, learning analytics, and teacher collaboration, this book is ideally designed for educators, administrative officials, linguists, academicians, researchers, and education students seeking coverage on an educator’s role in evaluation design and analyses of evaluation methods and outcomes.

What if multilingual learners had the freedom to interact in more than one language with their peers during classroom assessment? What if multilingual learners and their teachers in dual language settings had opportunities to use assessment data in multiple languages to make decisions? Just imagine the rich linguistic, academic, and cultural reservoirs we could tap as we determine what our multilingual learners know and can do. Thankfully, Margo Gottlieb is here to provide concrete and actionable guidance on how to create assessment systems that enable understanding of the whole student, not just that fraction of the student who is only visible as an English learner. With Classroom Assessment in Multiple Languages as your guide, you’ll: Better understand the rationale for and evidence on the value and advantages of classroom assessment in multiple languages Add to your toolkit of classroom assessment practices in one or multiple languages Be more precise and effective in your assessment of multilingual learners by embedding assessment as, for, and of learning into your instructional repertoire Recognize how social-emotional, content, and language learning are all tied to classroom assessment Guide multilingual learners in having voice and choice in the assessment process Despite the urgent need, assessment for multilingual learners is generally tucked into a remote chapter, if touched upon at all in a book; the number of resources narrows even more when multiple languages are brought into play. Here at last is that single resource on how educators and multilingual learners can mutually value languages and cultures in instruction and assessment throughout the school day and over time. We encourage you to get started right away. “Margo Gottlieb has demonstrated why the field, particularly the field as it involves the teaching of multilingual learners, needs another assessment book, particularly a book like this. . . . Classroom Assessment in Multiple Languages quite likely could serve as a catalyst toward the beginning of an enlightened discourse around assessment that will benefit multilingual learners.” ~Kathy Escamilla

Learning English as a foreign language in any formal education context requires opportunities for learners and teachers to give and receive feedback on the teaching learning process as it is happening. These opportunities could be created via various in-class activities specifically designed for this purpose. Teachers who create and use these diagnostic opportunities effectively detect what learners need in a timely fashion, and provide remedial teaching in the right time and mode, so that chances can be created for learners to improve their learning. There is no one universally accepted way of how to do this, however, with various approaches for collecting, analyzing and reviewing data for this purpose. This book encapsulates the unbreakable relationship between teaching, learning and assessment through a range of articles which scrutinize assessment from a wide spectrum, ranging from the role of assessment in language learning to ELT teacher assessment literacy, from the use of technology in classroom-based assessment to practicing teachers’ reflections on their teacher classroom action research, and from the role of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to empirical data analysis.