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Date Posted: 15:30:16 06/13/07 Wed
Author: Fernanda Dias
Subject: Task 4

The Continuous Assessment in English Teaching as a more reliable Assessment Method


The continuous assessment in English teaching process is a powerful and effective tool to evaluate students’ learning progress, based on, just as the name says by itself, the continuous evaluation through informal means. Its main aim is to provide a more reliable result that is supposed to reflect the real learners’ learning performance, and that is exactly the reason why courses of English as second language have been increasingly adopting such method for evaluation.

According to Oxford’s researches on Assessment Methods (Assessment Methods, Oxford, 1998), the considered ordinary evaluations; which are the set of formal evaluation methods that has been used for many years; has 71%of reliability in contrast to the innovating continuous method that has been discovered to have 85%. Although the difference of 14% appears to be slight, it does mean something really significant when speaking of reliability in evaluation processes.

Reliability is a key factor of assessment methods that determines how much teachers will trust the results pointed out by tests. A reliable evaluation is that one which is capable of getting the most spontaneous, and thus, real expressions of English in all of its four skills (reading, speaking, listening, and writing). Therefore, the continuous assessment method has shown to be more reliable because, as its evaluations are done through informal means, they are much less likely to inhibit students to express themselves in English besides the fact that they also produce less pressure over them, since every continuous evaluation is done under comfortable circumstances.

In other words, even though the continuous assessment can be said to have its subjective side for its informal characteristics, and that such fact would make it lose some reliability, it still will not let to have more reliability that the ordinary methods of evaluation. Since the continuous assessment gives students the opportunity to be evaluated more spontaneously, that is, without second interferences such as time boundary, exam tension, and cheating strategies; the continuous assessment is certainly the most appropriate evaluation method for those teachers who are seeking for more reliability in the final tests result.

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