Brown's chapter on assessment coincides with the article that we read last week about writing. There are many components to assessment, the major one is the variety of assessments that a teacher can use. They can be assessed as an ongoing assignment, interaction, portfolio (like in the article) or formative way. They can also be assessed on a "storehouse of skills and knowledge, usually within a relatively short time limit" (402 second edition). The chapter presents the validity of the different testing/assessing. For the midterm that I used for my ELI students I would say was a more interactive language test. Based on what the students have practiced in class, debate, disscussion, vocabulary, or other various activities, they had to complete various communicative tasks for the midterm. Midterm multiple choice tests would be invalid to the content of the class. We have just completed an analysis of a standardized test of our choice in our ENG 346 class. In this class I have realized that standardized tests, although undesirable to many teachers, are unavoidable to any teacher of a second language learner. What are some ways that we can use this testing backwash to our advantage in our classroom? A testing strategy that I thought was interesting was the cooperative test construction, I do not think any of my language teachers have used this on me, but this past week in a Chicago ESL classroom that I observed, the teacher had the students creating "wh" questions and told them that some of the questions would appear on a test they would take later on.
Kuma's Lanuguage Awarness in the US or Whole Language movement, claims that "It does not exclude some languages, some dialects, or some registers because their speakers lack status in a particular society" (158). This is also emphasized later in the book as a component of Critical Language Awareness (CLA). Language in a critical awareness allows students to have power over their language interpreting it in specific sociopolitical contexts. Then Kuma presents a difference in the view of the teachers role in this critical awareness. Does the teacher help the learners "understand how language is used by some as a tool for social, economic, and political control" or "can [they] cooperatein their own marginalization by seeing themselves as 'language teachers
' with no connection to such social and political issues" (165)? I think that the second option that Gee presents is a misrepresentation of language, like Paulo Frieres view of teaching as a transformative intelectual, there are deeply embedded social, economic, and political powers within the education system.
Intuitive Heuristics is basically the self discovery of language of a student. Kuma describes heuristics in a grammar context, since the rules are definite in a grammar class. I compare this idea to the teaching written grammar in the article last week, that self-correction is the essential skill to teach since writing is such a complex process, and in heuristics was of teaching it is all about leading your students to reason and not to memorize rules. However, previously, Kuma talks about the complexity of the English language spelling system alone, and how a students reasoning could lead them to spelling "fish" "ghoti." Also in beginning language learners I have always thought that explicit instruction of the grammatical rules are more effective. Can a heuristic type of teaching be used in every context (beginning-advanced) (spelling, syntax, subject-verb agreement, ect.)? Also, in the dialogue examples one of the teachers uses a book and the other uses a cartoon. The one with the cartoon seems to be more heuristic and more effective. Are there heuristic grammar text books and would they be effective and useful to teachers?
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