Planning Formative Assessments for the Four Domains

Welcome back to the My Adventures in ESL podcast. I am your host, Millie, and I am excited to be here with you all today. Now, in today’s podcast, I am going to be sharing with you how you can plan formative assessments for the four domains of language without being overwhelmed.

So welcome, I’m excited to be here. And we’re going to jump right into today’s topic. Before we do that, you know our weekly thing is to celebrate our wins for the week and every week I want to highlight your wins. So if you have one, send them in. Share them in our Facebook community on Facebook. The name of that Facebook community is My Adventures in ESL. I want you to join. I want you to come in and celebrate your wins.

We want to celebrate with you! If you have a win and you want to share, email me at millie@myadventuresinesl.com and share those wins. I have two wins this week. The first one is going to Betty. Betty is doing a really great job of structuring her classroom. She’s working really hard on making sure that she’s having engaging lessons and taking all the steps that she needs to get ready for the school year. So shout-out to Betty.

You’re doing a fantastic job. I also want to celebrate all of the teachers who are preparing to go back for the school year. I know most of you all are already back in the classroom, but the dedication that you have to the students is so appreciated. So thank you all for everything that you’re doing for the students all over the world. So thank you. 

Now, I told you that we’re going to be talking about how you can plan for formative assessments for your language learners. Thinking through formative assessments is a real key component of any classroom. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ESL class, math class,  or music class. You have to have formative assessments in your classroom. ESL teachers have to be extra mindful of providing formative assessments in the four domains of language. And I prefer doing these formative assessments in the four domains of language. And if you’re wondering what they are, the four domains of language are listening, reading, speaking and writing.

 I know that this can sometimes be a challenge due to time constraints, unclear lesson plans, and simply not knowing how to assess your students in the four domains but if you’re a new teacher and you are wondering what is a formative assessment, a formative assessment is an assessment that measures comprehension in the process of actually learning a skill. So it’s like an on-the-spot assessment while the students are acquiring new knowledge. And a summative assessment measures it at the end of a lesson, asking the question, “what did the student learn overall?”.

I just want to be clear about these two different types of assessments. A formative assessment, which is you assessing the student while they’re in the middle of learning a new skill and a new topic. Jumping back into the podcast I want to make sure that we’re clear because we may have some new teachers that are listening. 

A summative assessment, is something that they get at the end of the year. But I can remember getting those student scores back and feeling confused, feeling frustrated and almost upset because I thought I was doing everything that I could do to make sure that my students are growing.

I  started to reflect and I really started thinking about how I was supporting the students throughout the school year. And while I was reflecting, I realized that I did not have a solid idea how my students were progressing in the four domains of language. That’s when the light bulb went off and I immediately started to transform my lessons.

I knew that I needed language objectives in my lesson, and this allowed me to be very clear about what language domain that I’d  be assessing for the day. I also gave myself grace. And what I mean by this is that I took that unneeded pressure that I was putting on myself – that feeling like I had to assess all of the four domains in a class period. For example, on Monday, I realized that I could do a formative assessment on reading and listening by having the students listen and read along with an audio book.

They tackled two domains in a day. And then on Tuesday, I could do a formative assessment on speaking by having the students do discussion prompts. And then on Wednesday, I could do a form of assessment by having the students do a quick write on the text that they were reading.

So it took that unneeded pressure off that I had to hit all four domains in one day. I realized that I can break it up over one to three days if I wanted to. I also planned for a toolbox of formative assessments by domain. Meaning that I had a toolbox of assessments that I could use broken up by domains. And this way I could always have a list of assessments that I could pull out of my hat throughout the year.

 Being mindful and intentional while I was doing my lesson planning was also really helpful. I would ask myself while planning – which domain am I assessing the students on  and how am I going to be  doing that? So while you are planning for the domains, I want you to first take off any pressure that you’re putting on yourself that you have to feel like you have to do all four in a class period. You can assess it in chunks throughout the week. Remember to do input assessments

and by input, I mean  listening and reading assessments before you do those output assessments, like speaking and writing. You want the students to take in the information first and then show you how they process it and how they learn. I also want to encourage you to do, or to create, rather, a tool box of form of assessments. Having this tool box will allow you to assess on the spot if you feel the need, that the students need some additional help. And sometimes this happens after teacher observations. 

Lastly, be mindful and very intentional while you’re planning your daily lessons to even insert the question, “what domain am I formally assessing in this lesson and how am I going to be assessing it?” This will help you guide your lesson planning while you’re trying to plan for those four domains in your lesson. 

Now, here are your next steps. I want you to look at your lesson plans for the upcoming school year and just ask yourself, how are you going to assess your language learners in the four domains of language? And if you’re stuck, use the strategies and tips from today’s podcast to help you in planning for the school year.

 I would like to know and the community would like to know, what are some formative assessments that you would include in your teacher toolbox? Share your ideas in our Facebook community, on My Adventures in ESL on Facebook, some ideas that you would include in your formative assessment teacher toolbox. Once again, thank you for stopping by. I am excited, as usual, to be here with you, and I hope you have a fantastic week! 

 See you soon!