Teacher Assessment Model on Teaching Speaking Skill to the Students of the Eleventh Grade at SMA I Paciran in the Academic year 2013/2014

By Noor Jannah

According to the phenomenon which appears on the classroom English learning process can be explained by the fact that current learners have better basics in English skills than the learners had a few years ago.

The current school reform effort emphasizes the need to improve the education of all students. Assessing the academic achievement of every student is an essential part of this reform, but one that presents a challenge for most schools in Indonesia still uses the traditional assessment in assessing the students’ progress and many school districts have tended to exclude students who are learning English as a second language.

Assessment and Teaching

Assessment is a popular and sometimes misunderstood term in current education practice Teacher might be tempted to think of testing and assessing as synonymous terms, but they are not (Douglas, 1999, p. 20).  Tests are prepared administrative procedure that occurs at identifiable times in a curriculum when learners muster all their faculties to offer peak performance, knowing that their response are being measured and evaluated.

Assessment Principles

The heterogeneity of assessment methods and assessment criteria does not mean as­sessment has no principles to follow. On the contrary, some vital principles have to be observed if effective assessment is to be made. Generally speaking, assessment should:

•   assess authentic use of language in reading, writing, speaking, and listening;

•   assess literacy and language in a variety of contexts;

•   assess the environment, the instruction, anti the students;

•   assess processes as well as products;

•   analyze patterns of errors in language and literacy;

•   be based on normal developmental patterns and behavior in language and literacy acquisition;

•   clarify and use standards when assessing reading, writing, and content knowledge:

•   involve students and parents, as well as other personnel such as the ESL or main­stream teacher, in the assessment process;

•   be an ongoing part of every day. (Law and Decks, 1995, p. 45)

It is ideal if assessors can follow all these principles. But in reality, it is very difficult to achieve this. First of all, “assess authentic use of language” is extremely difficult, is not desirable. According to this principle, to assess a learner’s oral skills, it is best to see how he or she performs in a real communication situation, for example, asking for directions on the street. Can the teachers do this on the street? What teachers usually do is to give the student a situation and ask what he or she should say in that situation. For example, what would teachers say if they want to ask the policeman how to go to the rail­way station? But this is not real communication. That the student knows what to say does not mean he or she can really say it in the real situation.

The Kind of Assessment

(Malice, 2000, p. 11) states that assessment is often associated with testing, so speaking of assessment methods, many teachers immediately think of tests. However, there is an important difference between assessment and testing.

Assessment is a broader term. It implies evaluation based on a collection of informa­tion about what students know and can do. This involves many ways and methods of information gathering, formal and informal, at different times and in different con­texts. Testing is part of assessment, but it is only one means of gathering information about a student. The focus in testing is on finding the norm. Assessment is broader than testing. The teacher is looking at progress over time in a variety of contexts.

Teachers’ assessment

The previous Research that is done by language expert in oxford university 2000  shows that the teacher’s knowledge of children and their strengths and weak­nesses is more accurate and sound than testing (Law and Decks, 1995, p. 44).

Continuous assessment

The final grade given to the student is not his or her mark on the final exam paper; rather, it is some kind of combination of the grades the learner has received for various assignments during the course.

Self-assessment

Most students themselves are given the chance to evaluate their own performance, us­ing clear criteria and weighting systems agreed on students and teachers in the learning process. Cohune (1999, p. 21) as­serts that students are able to make quite accurate assessments of their own achieve­ments.

Portfolios

Portfolios are collections of assignments and projects that students have done over a long period of time. These materials are usually put in a file kept by the students or the teacher. The portfolios provide the basis for evaluation.

Learner self-assessment

By recording the results of self-evaluation of speaking, it implies students’ judgment of

their performance in each competence.

Self-evaluation	vocabulary	grammar	Pronuncition	fluency
Excellent	-	-	-	-
good	-	-	-	-
minimal	-	-	-	-
	-	-	-	-
	-	-	-	-

Classroom Language Assessment

The classroom language assessment is to develop a framework for understanding a Reformed view of assessment, where assessment plays an integral role in teaching and learning. The Classroom Language Assessment focuses on four scales of performance, namely:

(a) Grammatical Accuracy,

(b) Pronunciation, Stress and Intonation,

(c) The Language of Interaction,

(d) The Language of Instruction. For a detailed description of this paper,

Types of tests as the part of Assessment

According to Brown (1999, p. 77) there are four basic types of language tests: aptitude tests, progress tests, achievement tests, and proficiency tests.

(1) The aptitude test

The aptitude test is conceived as a prognostic measure that indicates whether a student is likely to learn a second language readily.

(2) The progress test

(3) The achievement test

The achievement test is similar to the progress test in that it measures how much the student has learned in the course of second-language instruction.  instruction.

(4) The proficiency test

The proficiency test also measures what students have learned, but the aim of the proficiency test is to determine whether this language ability corres­ponds to specific language requirements.

General Testing terminology 

(1) Test and quiz

(2 ) Objective and subjective test items

(3) Speed and power tests

(4 )  Formative and summative evaluation

Speaking

Speaking is an integrated skill because it consists of some skill. In studying English the students are more interest in spoken than written. Alexander (1997, p. 8) says that the great of overseas students learning English are primarily interest in speaking. This statement is, clear than in learning English the student are more interested in speaking than writing.

The Components of Speaking Ability.

In the previous discussion, it is said that speaking is an integrated skill because there are some skills in it. To have a good speaking the students must master them. According to Djiwandono (1996, p. 68) the components of speaking ability are vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and the fluency of expressing ideas.

The target of speaking ability for foreign language teachers can be classified into three levels, namely:

1.     Minimal

This lowest target aims at an ability to talk on prepared topic, to use common idioms and the language usage can be understood by the native speakers.

2.     Good

The target of this level is an ability to talk with a normal speed to native speaker of the target language. Without glaring mistake in grammar and vocabulary.

3.     Excellent

The highest target of speaking ability is when the learners can achieve near native speakers.

Research Design

This study is a qualitative research. In qualitative research, the writer does not need any statistic. The writer only needs to describe the subject of the research without giving any statistical data treatments.

Subject of the Study

In this study, the subject of the study is the eleventh year students of SMA Negeri 1 Paciran. The writer chooses this school because it is applied classroom based assessment as the alternative assessment to the students’ English competence. There are 2 group classes they are XI IPA and XI IPS, but the writer only takes one class, XI IPS 1 to be observed because teachers’ suggestion. There are about 29 students of this class who mostly active in class. So the writer chooses this class because writer is interested in it very much.

Research Instruments

In order to collect the data, the researcher uses instruments. Here, the researcher should use and select the appropriate instruments so that the data taken will be as accurate as possible. In this study, the researcher is as the non-participant observer or passive participant which means that the researcher is not included in teaching and learning process. There are three instruments used in this study that is observation checklist, field note and question for interview.

Technique of Collecting Data

After preparing anything dealing with the study, it is time to collect the data. These are two steps to collect the data needed:

1.     Observation

2.     Interview

Research Procedure

Procedure in collecting data is accordance with the problem being investigated. It deals with how to get the data needed until finishing the research.

1.     Before collecting data the writer got a letter of recommendation signed by to the rector of UNIMA Malang. The writer asked the headmaster of SMA Negeri 1 Paciran to give permission to conduct the investigation in the school.

2.     The writer met English teacher Mrs. Wiwiek Noor Sanah to get information related to the assessment.

3.     The writer got the opportunity from English teacher to observe and interview the students during the English learning process.

4.     The writer is doing the analysis to the data that researcher got from observation and interview.

5.     The writer gives interpretation to the data after analyzing the data 

6.     The writer makes conclusion to the research.

Data Analysis

Data analysis in qualitative research begins soon after data collection begins. Qualitative data analysis required organization of information and data reduction. Analyzing the data in qualitative study essentially involved synthesizing the information the  researcher obtained from various sources, in the case observation list and also note taking. Then those data will interpret or described into a coherent description of what the researcher had observed or discovered. All the data presented in this study in a descriptive way and without any statistical matter. The descriptive data come from the analysis of observation, and analysis of the result of interview also interprets of note taking.

According to the Miles and Huberman (1984, p. 337), say that the activities of analyzing during the qualitative research interactively and continuously to get the final result. They are data reduction, data display, and conclusions.

Finding Research

During research activities, the writer did observation and saw the phenomenon that happened in English class. Teaching and learning process and assessment conducted by English teacher at SMA Negeri 1Paciran is used assessment model because the teacher used observation involve choose, describe, match, read, recognize and say.

Result of the Research

This chapter result of the research. After finishing the research, the writer writes this chapter. The result supporting data which were collected by classroom observation and interview.

The Result from Observation to Describe Assessing Speaking Competence 

The data that will be described is the result of the observation to describe the assessing speaking competence. The researcher will describe all teaching learning process during the observation in detail. From these stages, will focus on commonly identified types of speaking performance by recognizing all the element of speaking they are, dialogue completion task element, and picture cued elicitation.

The Result and Interpretation of Interview

In this study, researcher will try to describe the students’ opinion to the assessment that is given by the teacher at SMA Negeri 1 Paciran. In coducting interview the writer used a sampling method by taking a sample of three students with differentlevels of competence. The first students with score mean 8.5, the second student with score mean 7 and the third students with score mean 6. The writer does this activity for ten minutes to each student.