The importance of being able to speak a foreign language in today's society is increasing, and the value of early foreign language education is gaining status. The school system is adapting to this by offering foreign language classes as early as 1st grade. The curiosity and spontaneity of young language learners gives them the benefit of relaxed learning, given enough high quality target language input, suitable for the specific age group. However, the distinct developmental characteristics pose a challenge for teachers that have to assess these pupils’ language skills. The purpose of this master’s thesis was to observe how English teachers in 5th grade approach teaching and assessing their pupils. We used a triangulation of methods for data collection, using a questionnaire to find out their teaching methods and assessment planning practices, and gaining an insight into their language assessment techniques by analysing their tests. The theoretical section of the thesis describes the specifications of teaching a foreign language to young learners, how their developmental characteristics guide the practices used in class, and the guidelines for assessing individual language skills. We included an additional chapter with actual guidelines and suggestions for designing useful tests.
The empirical section comprises of our research results and findings. We observed that teachers in class dedicate a relatively equal portion of their lesson for each language skill, yet they do not translate this into their tests, resulting in a disproportionally small amount of listening comprehension tasks in their written assessment. A significant correlation was found only between teaching and assessing grammar. We confirmed our predictions that most test tasks would meet the criterion of construct validity, and that the majority of the tasks aim to assess reading comprehension. The key shortcomings we found were insufficient instructions and lack of examples for individual tasks. We compiled a few suggestions for improving these classroom tests, based on our findings, which is why we believe this thesis is useful for 5th grade English teachers, as well as any other foreign language teachers, since we believe that some mistakes occur throughout all grades. Furthermore, our research gives an overview of English test design, and that can be taken into consideration for further research in this field.
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