Hey, teachers! 👋

Today we will talk about formative assessment in English lessons.

The concept of formative assessment does not necessarily have to be associated with traditional teaching and learning. We can use it to diversify and enrich our lessons because formative assessment has a number of advantages for both learners and teachers of English.

What is the essence of formative assessment?

In a nutshell, formative assessment is when a teacher monitors what students already know while they are still learning. The main purpose of formative assessment is to identify whether your students are successful in learning, and determine how to build their learning and adjust your teaching in the future. On the other hand, formative assessment is all the tools we can use to check how well students have mastered the material. It can take the form of a quiz or an individual task, a game, group work, a project, a presentation, Q&A sessions, tests, etc. All this helps the teacher to assess whether the aims of individual lessons, units/modules, long-term and short-term goals have been met. In addition, such assessment helps keep students on track to achieving language acquisition goals within the curriculum.

How can students benefit from formative assessment? 

🔹If you use formative assessment regularly (for example, do a quiz every Friday), it provides an element of regularity and  safety for students.

🔹Formative assessment can take many forms, so it breaks the monotony of the traditional classroom environment, where the learning-testing-learning system prevails.

🔹Formative assessment does not require the use of traditional marks such as numbers (1-12) or letters (A, B, C, D). Instead, the "pass" / "fail" system or even colours, stars, or other symbols are used. This relieves some of the stress from students and allows them to simply focus on language acquisition instead of grades.

🔹Formative assessment has a positive impact on language acquisition.

How do teachers benefit from formative assessment?

🔸We can use formative assessment to adjust our teaching methods or strategies.

🔸Formative assessment can help us identify our weaknesses. Each class is a group of different students, with different abilities and levels of English. That’s why we cannot use a universal approach to teach them. Formative assessment helps identify these individual vulnerabilities.

🔸Formative assessment helps to identify problems faster than summative assessment, and solve them before it’s too late.

🔸Formative assessment can take any form. Thus, it is quite a flexible tool in the hands of the teacher.

🔸Formative assessment helps us decide whether to move forward or linger a little longer on a particular language issue.

🔸The introduction of formative assessment helps teachers better understand their students as well as become stronger teachers. 

In the next letter, coming out in a week, we are going to talk about ways to do formative assessment with lots of useful examples.

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