It is important to select the type of test tasks the students are going to deal with in the test. 

http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/choosing-and-devising-test-tasks

Assesing English Lenguage Learners

Administering Assessment

Chapter VIII

      Create a positive attitude toward testing: use test to motivate students telling them that their results help them to learn.

      Be transparent: Explain what is the test and the results for.

      Follow proctoring instructions or instructions in the test manual to the letter: for results to be interpreted meaningfully, a test must be administered under standard conditions.

      Prepare policies and procedures well in advance: make sure that everyone involved is aware of policies and procedures.

      Explain to the students the distinction between teaching and testing: group and pair work activities are important in teaching, in testing the mail goal is to assess individually.

      Refrain from helping students who are having difficulty: It’s mainly because it’s not fair for students who have prepared sufficiently.

      Note unexpected events that might interfere with assessment: take into consideration special issues that can affect when interpreting information for the test.

      Adopt special needs assessment policy: It’s a must.

      Inform students of consequences of academic dishonesty: explain the consequences of cheating and the institution policy about it.

      Minimize the opportunities of  cheating and plagiarism.

Assessing English Language Learners

Ten Things to Remember About Student Test-Taking Skills

Chapter VII

      Student test-taking skills are really good skills: think on teaching and testing working together to build better language skills.

      Build skill strategies into the classroom teaching: Whenever possible, highlight skills strategies and allow time for regular practice.

      Spend time on reading and following instructions:  Reading and following instructions is a real-life task. Spend time on in is valuable for the students.

      Familiarize your students with a range of formats: constantly introduce new formats and allow plenty of time to practice them.

      Promote and reward good planning: Foster a positive attitude toward by rewarding students who make an effort.

      Discuss and practice timing issues: Promote developing time management skills in students’ provident timed tasks.

      Encourage a variety of review activities: If is possible provide time, space and materials to help the students to review efficiently.

      Remind students of the importance of rest, recreation and diet in exams periods.

      Provide students with helpful feedback: It helps them to improve.

      Active encourage learner autonomy through self-assessment: Regularly use self-assessment techniques to foster autonomy.

Assessing English Language Learners
http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/choosing-and-devising-test-tasks

http://www.slideshare.net/yoguitika/special-needs-8409290

Students with special needs motivational presentation for teachers and students.

Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter VI Assessing Speaking

Assessing Speaking can be divided by the purpose. In daily life is an important mean of communication, give and receive messages, communicate. In academic programs is focused on presentations of information. In business English the focus is on telephone, customer services skills, make reports or interact in meetings. Depending on the program , the assessment must reflect the course objectives.

Speaking is a complex skill that also depends on other skills such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The main issue when assessing speaking is the time consuming when applying the test individually for large groups.

The following considerations must be taken in to account when designing assessment tasks for speaking: choose tasks that generate positive washback for teaching and learning, these tasks should be authentic as possible, allow time for warm up, keep skill contamination in mind, large samples of language are more reliable, use a range of appropriate techniques, ensure reliable scoring by choosing appropriate scales, train teachers in scoring, personalize the test using students’ names, never mark the test in front of the students.

The following techniques for assessment speaking are commonly used and  finding an appropriate scale for scoring each one is a must: oral presentations, debates, reading aloud, retelling stories, verbal essays and extemporaneous speaking.

Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter V Assessing Listening

As reading, listening is an invisible and interactive skill, again bottom up and top down processes are involve actively constructing meaning.  However, this skill has been neglected emphasizing productive skills. There are 3 approaches to listening: discrete point (brakes the listening in to components assessed separately), the integrative approach (like in dictation and cloze tasks, it integrates the components) and the communicative approach (understand the message and use it in context).

Before designing assessment tasks, is important to differentiate academic and general listening.  In  general listening 33 micro skills have been identified, such as: clustering, recognizing, redundancy, comprehending reduced forms and hesitations, pauses, false starts and corrections, understanding colloquial language, processing prosodic features, understanding and using rules of conversation interaction, etc.  For academic listening there are some higher micro skills that include: identifying the purpose of a lecture and its logical development, understand the relationship among discourse units, recognize lexical terms, etc.

It is important to take in to account that in spite of the difficulties of assessing the skill, it has to be assessed. Reading aloud must be changed for real listening texts (conversations for example), give credit for what the students know ( focus on listening comprehension only), give importance to the background knowledge, Focus on meaning, give a purpose for listening, don’t expect full comprehension, use listening task in which reading or writing is done a little, assess all types of listening.

Good techniques assessing listening are: are: phonemic discrimination, paraphrase recognition, objective formats: (Multiple Choice (three options only), T/F, Short Answer, cloze, dictation, information transfer and note taking.