June 1-7, 2019 marks the week of Congress at UBC. To bring Congress closer to our colleagues, Asian Studies sponsored another annual language teaching workshop on the Assessment of Spoken Interaction for all language instructors in the Department.
Dr. Beverly Baker, a founding member of the Canadian Association of Language Assessment (CALA), was invited to talk to our instructors on the topic of the teaching and assessment of spoken interaction, following her keynote presentation in the Congress Pedagogy Hub session on Assessing Language Performance: A showcase of established and innovative tools to assess different language skills.
In this workshop, Dr. Baker discussed the research literature on formative and summative assessment activities in the language classroom. In the different language groups, participants had a chance to examine and critique some examples of speaking interaction tasks, in addition to sharing their own. Participants also had a rare opportunity to review rubrics, discuss important factors in making a successful rubric, and use such information in order to make rubrics more useful, reliable, and efficient for their own teaching.
It was a great opportunity for instructors from the Cantonese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Persian programs as well as guests from other language programs (French, German, Spanish), to get together and reflect on this interesting and important topic in language teaching. Participants found it helpful in “clarifying significant issues in designing effective assessment and relevant rubrics” and commented that this would “lead to enhancement in students’ learning experience and outcomes”.
Speaker and Workshop Facilitator: Dr. Beverly A. Baker
Beverly Baker is an Associate Professor at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute at the University of Ottawa, where she also serves as the Director of Language Assessment. She has widely worked and published in the areas of language teacher development and language assessment. Beverly is a founding member of the Canadian Association of Language Assessment (CALA) as well as the language assessment literacy special interest group of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA). Over her career, she has given workshops to more than 1000 teachers on language assessment topics.
