WHAT IS ASSESSMENT?
The title 'assessment' has been chosen instead of 'testing' for its
wider view. For a language teacher assessment includes any
means of checking what students can do with the language. It also
includes what they cannot do, but proper assessment gives due
weight to the positive side of their achievement.
Educational language assessment involves the use of a
variety of procedures and tools to collect information about
teaching and learning, and more importantly about students'
language ability which is not only useful but necessary to prepare
them for success. The most common kind of assessment
procedure is testing. Testing means presenting a student with a set
of questions or tasks in order to obtain a measure of performance
often represented by a score.
