ABSTRACT
Assessment is just as essential to the language classroom as any teaching activity or task, yet much of the literature on second language classroom assessment tends to limit itself to definitions of assessment, differentiating between planned and informal measure. This chapter provides language teachers plan, design, and carry out assessment with their students from a practical standpoint. In contrast, language teachers can use at least a dozen different types of items across four categories: selected-response items, productive-response items, personalized-response items, and individualized-response items. Selected-response items require learners to choose from a set of responses rather than produce one of their own. Productive-response items have the advantage of requiring students to actually produce a response in the target language. Feedback in assessment is most often associated with scores of some kind, which indicate a particular level of performance or amount learned in a set of language materials or classroom activities.
