Page 185 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Effective Assessment

in higher motivation of learners or positive attitudes towards learning the
language, while avoiding negative experiences which may result in anxiety
or confusion. Motivation is a vital issue in YLs’ assessment, especially consid-
ering that a negative impact may have a harmful effect on learners’ future
language learning (Papp, 2019).

Discussion
1. Read about how a teacher uses ongoing assessment and discuss its effect
on YLs.
2. Discuss which aspect of assessment you find most challenging.

Key Takeaways
• Assessment tasksfor YLLsneed to be designed with extra care, considering
their age, cognitive, motor, linguistic, emotional, and social development.
• We can distinguish between different types of assessment: formal and in-
formal, formative and summative, as well as performance and knowledge
assessment.
• As YLLs are a sensitive population, we need to pay special attention to as-
sessment reliability.
Further Reading
Ioannou-Georgiou, S., & Pavlou, P. (2003). Assessing young learners. Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Papp, S. (2019). Assessment of young English language learners. In S. Garton
&F.Copland (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of teaching English to young
learner (pp. 389–409). Routledge.
Nikolov, M. (Ed.). (2016). AssessingyounglearnersofEnglish:Globalandlocalper-
spectives. Springer.

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