Items will be posted with the newest at the top.
Links open in new windows.

13 February

Assignment 4 has been simplified: you need not conduct the language-learning activity and score an actual (or contrived) sample. (Late evening:) The scoring guide is also ready.

9 January

The "Schedule & Assignments" page has been expanded to include: topics, reading for the next few meetings, and a list of the main course assignments (not yet with specifications and due dates)

The Hughes books is now on reserve in the PSU library. Someone in our class had checked it out and (thank you!) kindly turned it in immediately.

Sara Kuehlhorn is now keeping copies of Hughes and Lynch/Davidson in her office and will lend them briefly to members of the class.

The PSU Bookstore still has many copies of Hughes. There are (4pm, 9 January) no copies of Stevens on the shelves under FL, which is puzzling to the bookstore people, since their computer lists 8 copies still in the store. They are chasing down those copies. The Stevens book has not yet arrived. No need to worry about Lynch/Davidson or Stevens for a while; we won't be using them for another 2 weeks.

Say! In our discussion of kinds of assessment, no one mentioned assessing Culture. We'll raise the issue at a meeting soon.

2 December

Dear FLL and AL students,

Due to a staff emergency in the Department of Applied Linguistics, I have been asked to teach LING 439/539 Assessment along with FLL 493/493 Assessment. The shift in the day/time schedule to the slot already used for FLL 493/593 (TR 1640-1830) was made necessary by my own schedule; I already teach another FLL course in the slot (TR 1400-1550) for which the LING course was scheduled.

Despite the emergency, the combination of courses is welcome to me and to both departments involved. We have cooperated often over many years, and I particularly have been involved with AL as a reader of MA theses there. We have also frequently discussed sharing courses. I hope this unfortunate emergency circumstance will lead to a richer assessment course and to more such opportunities, perhaps a joint course in technology for language teachers, which I already do for FLL.

Between the FLL and AL/TESOL fields there are significant differences, and so the FLL and AL courses differed significantly. And yet the two fields really do need to know more about each other. So it is both necessary and, ultimately, beneficial that this year's combined course will help acquaint the TESOLers and FLLers with each other's area. But both areas will receive separate attention when certain of their particular interests need special attention and are not of major importance to the other field. (Examples: the on-line TOEFL and the detailed techniques of the ACTFL OPI)

To help coordinate the combined course, AL has assigned to it an adjunct faculty member, Sara Kuehlhorn. Ms. Kuehlhorn is finishing her MA in TESOL, but also has a background in foreign languages. We have been working together for a month now, and I think most highly of her. I have also been discussing the course with Steve Reder, AL Chair, and we have agreed that several new themes should be added to it - not FLL themes, but rather larger topics in assessment, such as state preK-20 standards and assessments, systematic attention to rubrics / scoring guides, assessment of teaching resources, grants for assessment projects, and even language teacher self-assessment of professional development.

Ms. Kuehlhorn and I have list the topics below as major themes of the course, though we will probably add a few more, or maybe decrease the emphasis on some:

• fundamental concepts of testing (kinds, purposes, clients / communities, determinations of quality)

• national / international proficiency standards and definitions of competence

• commonly used assessments, including TOEFL and ACTFL OPI

• state standards and assessment tools, and their relation to curriculum and content

• creating test specifications

• creating rubrics / scoring guides

• computer-assisted testing: IBT and WebCAPE

• assessment and statistics

• assessing resources (textbooks, etc.)

• curriculum, program, institutional and system assessment, including departmental assessment at PSU, learner-outcomes assessment at PSU and in OUS

• teacher self-assessment (professional progress)

• financing assessment and research (familiarization with grants and projects

These can serve as an outline of the course until we have a syllabus for it, which I expect to post by mid-December. In the meantime I will also be gathering email addresses and trying to contact the people who have registered for the course.

We expect to use Testing for Language Teachers, by Arthur Hughes, as our printed textbook, but it will be accompanied by other required reading that will be available as a photocopy package, from download via our course website, by access to the ACTFL and TESOL websites. There may be a secondary printed textbook specific to AL and FLL, probably Testcraft by Davidson and Lynch for AL, and Introduction to Rubrics by Stevens and Levi for FLL. PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ACQUIRE THESE BOOKS until we announce a firm decision.

We are still determining the sequence of topics and the selection of assignments. Please check this website every week or so before the start of classes in January.