Assessment of Language Skill

An important part after teaching is testing or giving assessment. Its commonly use by the teacher to measure the student’s ability in comprehending the material that the teacher taught. In addition, to know about the methods and techniques that teacher applied are success and acceptable for students or not.
Assessment is the process of collecting and data analyze which is getting by acceptable measurement. In the other hand we can say that assessment is the process to know the students’ ability in lesson authority by giving them test that related to what they have learnt before.. Assessment can be focus on the individual learner, or learning group. In assessing language skill we have different ways to assess it. It should be separated because each skill need for certain properties of measurement.

1.     Assessing Listening Skill
Listening tests typically similar with reading comprehension tests.  The student then answers multiple-choice questions that address various levels of literal and inferential comprehension. Important elements in all listening tests are (1) the listening stimuli, (2) the questions, and (3) the test environment.
The listening stimuli should represent typical oral language, and not consist of simply the oral reading of passages designed to be written material. The material should model the language that students might typically be expected to hear in the classroom, in various media, or in conversations. Since listening performance is strongly influenced by motivation and memory, the passages should be interesting and relatively short. To ensure fairness, topics should be grounded in experience common to all students, irrespective of sex and geographic, socioeconomic, or racial/ethnic background.
In regard to questions, multiple-choice items should focus on the most important aspects of the passage -- not trivial details -- and should measure skills from a particular domain. Answers designated as correct should be derived from the passage, without reliance on the student's prior knowledge or experience. Questions and response choices should meet accepted psychometric standards for multiple-choice questions.
An alternative to the multiple-choice test is a performance test that requires students to select a picture or actually perform a task based on oral instruction. For example, students might hear a description of several geometric figures and choose pictures that match the description, or they might be given a map and instructed to trace a route that is described orally.
The testing environment for listening assessment should be free of external distractions. If stimuli are presented from a tape, the sound quality should be excellent. If stimuli are presented by a test administrator, the material should be presented clearly, with appropriate volume and rate of speaking.
2.    Assessing Speaking Skill
Some of students think that speaking in English is hard to do since they confused and feel difficult to express their idea orally, restricted vocabulary that they have, they do not master in grammar, etc. In doing assessment of speaking the teacher should give attention to; intonation, pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and diction. The ways that we can use is by performance test such as:
a)    Oral interview
b)    Story telling
c)    Presentation
d)    Making dialogue
e)    Drama
f)    Role play
to give score for students’ ability in speaking skill, teachers need score instrument such as rubric. It can be used for giving more measurable and observable score.

3.    Assessing Reading Skill
Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading. So, in order to assess reading we can do this:
•    Reading Aloud
A student's performance when reading aloud is not a reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking ability in the way that reading aloud requires.
In addition, reading aloud is a task that students will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.
However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess whether a student is "seeing" word endings and other grammatical features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the "read and look up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text, and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if any, the student is missing.
•    Comprehension Questions
Instructors often use comprehension questions to test whether students have understood what they have read. In order to test comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific information, comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that support it, comprehension questions should ask about those points.
•    Authentic Assessment
In order to provide authentic assessment of students' reading proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through reading. To develop authentic assessment activities, consider the type of response that reading a particular selection would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set of instructions, one might   repeat them to someone else; after reading a short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for selecting appropriate post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts of the text. See Assessing Learning for more on checklists and rubrics.

4.    Assessing Writing Skill
At the end of every term all faculty who teach writing-intensive courses should evaluate the extent to which each students’ writing demonstrates the goal: To communicate in clear prose using proper grammar and observing stylistic norms. It closely similar with testing speaking skill because we should consider about many things such as the content of the writing, grammar, punctuation and words choice. The test that we can give to students to assess their writing skill is authentic assessment, in form of:
•    Project/exhibition
•    Porto folio
•    Making Essay 



References
Dixon,Laura. How to Assess Reading Comprehension Skill. Retrieved from http://www.ehow.com/how_4870017_assess-reading-comprehension-skills.html#ixzz1hIpyb7Sn
Mead, Nancy A. - Rubin, Donald L.Teaching Reading: Assessing Reading Proficiency.Retrieved from: http//www.nclrc.org/essentials/assessing/asindex.htm. Downloaded at 12/22/2011

Stephenson, Agnes., Johnson, D.F., Jorgensen, M.A.,Young, M.J,. 2003. Assessing English Language Proficiency: Using Valid Results to Optimize Instruction. Pearson Inc.