Glogowski’s interest in assessment emerged out of his research on blogging communities and adolescent literacy. Read his thoughts on blogging and assessment and what he learned from his students
This paper presents a method for the assessment of oral fluency in Business English according to a two corpora-based lexical approach. The original query for our research is the possibility of esti- mating the level of oral skills among Business English (BE) learners by contrasting their word use in oral presentations with corpus data frequencies. Use of Information Technology (IT) resources and electronic BE corpora is thus measured in the evaluative approach to identify significant per- formance changes between learners who have used such electronic resources and learners who have not.
This paper considers current assessment practice, looks at the impact of the Internet on today’s learners, explores ways of modernising assessment to narrow the gap between the everyday lives of students and the assessment practices that we impose on them.
ABSTRACT: This article explores the emergence of multimodality as intrinsic to the learning, teaching and assessment of English in the Twenty-First Century. With subject traditions tied to the study of language, literature and media, multimodal texts and new technologies are now accorded overdue recognition in English curriculum documents in several countries, though assessment tends to remain largely print-centric. Until assessment modes and practices align with the nature of multimodal text production, their value as sites for inquiry in classroom practice will not be assured. The article takes up the question: What is involved in assessing the multimodal texts that students create? In exploring this question, we first consider central concepts of multimodality and what is involved in “working multimodally” to create a multimodal text. Here, “transmodal operation” and “staged multimodality” are considered as central concepts to “working multimodally”. Further, we suggest that these concepts challenge current understandings of the purposes of, and possibilities for, assessment of multimodal text production.