The Nature of Materials Evaluation

2 Step 2: Planning the evaluation It covers the consideration of how the materials developers will evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the task. Planning the evaluation is aimed to achieve a systematic and principled evaluation. 3 Step 3: Collecting Information This step considers on what information to collect, when to collect it, and how to collect it. There are three types of information will be needed to be considered in a task evaluation: a information about how the task was performed, b information about what learning look place as a result of performing the task, and c information regarding the teacher’s and the learner’s opinion about the task. 4 Step 4: Analysis of the information collected The important decisions facing the evaluator in this stage of evaluation is whether to provide a quantitative the use of numbers, the task rate or a qualitative whether the task has been accomplished successfully or not analysis of the data or both. 5 Step 5: Conclusions and recommendations Conclusions refer to what has been discovered as a result of the analysis, while recommendations concern proposals for future teaching. Separating the conclusions and recommendations enables a user of evaluation to determine whether the recommendations are valid in the light of the stated conclusions. It allows the user to agree with the conclusions yet disagree with the recommendations.

9. Assessing the Four Skills

Assessment Brown, 2004: 4 means an on-going process that covers the wider domain such as when students respond to the questions, offer comments, or try out the new words and structures. In those domains, the teacher usually makes an assessment on the students’ performances. In this case, tasks can be one of the forms of assessment that the teacher can make. However, not every tasks and teaching activities in the classroom involve assessment. Students in the classroom have to have the freedom to experiment and try out the language without feeling that their competence is being judged in terms of trials and errors. In assessing the four skills, teachers have to think about the two interacting concepts of performance and observation Brown, 2004: 117. When students perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, they rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish their performance. In addition, when the teachers propose to assess the students’ ability in one of the combination of the four skills, teachers assess the students’ competences but they observe the students’ performances. Below are the descriptions in assessing the four skills of the language.

a. Assessing Listening

In assessing listening, teachers can provide some tasks to the students. The assessment tasks Brown, 2004: 122-135 can be in the form of intensive listening minimal phonic pair recognition or paraphrase recognition, selective listening listening cloze, information transfer, or sentence