 Hi, wrth gwrs. My name is Teria, and I work for Swan ELT. I'd like to start by thanking Peter for introducing me to ELT Ireland. He's a good friend and colleague, so thank you. So today I'd like to talk about informal assessment because it's the subject of particular interest to me. So, when I started teaching about nine years ago, I found that informal assessment was something that occurred naturally, and it was something that kept coming up in every lesson, every day. My understanding of it at the time was quite hazy because I didn't know how to integrate it into the teaching and learning process. And I found myself assessing students when I didn't know I was doing it. And I also found myself, and I'm sure a lot of you would agree, that I was doing it even when I wasn't teaching. So I would go home and think, why is my husband using or my boyfriend using a different register today? Or why did he put a determiner in that place and not at the end of the sentence or in the middle, which is a bit sad, but it just means you have a love for language in general. So what is informal assessment? It can be formative in a sense that it allows us to check students' progress. And you have your immediate aims, so your lesson plan for that day is ready. But what you ultimately want to achieve is your learning aims for that day. And if you follow a weekly topic, our topic at a school, for example, sorry, our syllabus is topic-based. So whether it's topic-based or grammar-based or function-based, you have your immediate aims and you have your weekly targets by Friday what you want your students to achieve. And sometimes work sheets and classroom tasks do not give us the full picture. And also it determines how far students have progressed in terms of language acquisitions. So there is a focus on not so much on language accuracy, but linguistic competence as well. And I think a lot of that comes through when we look at informal assessment from a different angle. And also, as I said before, you can measure the progress you are making and students are making in line with the syllabus or the curriculum you're following. And most importantly, sometimes you find out what students have at their disposal. If they did a placement test, you might find out that their writing is very good, but they need help with grammar. But there are surprises that come up and sometimes you didn't know about them. And it helps you know your students better. But what did they already know that we didn't pick up at the beginning? So I'm no expert on how to informally assess students in every possible way. But these are ways I have used in my classroom. So I teach first certificate students and A2 learners in my morning class, although that class is now mixed levels. So that's a whole new adventure I'm looking forward to. In terms of speaking and listening, you often assess students while they're speaking. And you start to notice errors. You start to notice that they're using different register or they're struggling with sentence structure, for example. With first certificate students, they work in towards an examination. And they have their targets. So there is a heavy focus on accuracy. But I think informal assessment lifts that burden of having to stick to deadlines. And we need to learn the structure for writing an essay or presenting an argument. When I used to conduct speaking activities, it used to be a matter of getting the task done and getting through the language point of that day. But I recently found out that if I let students speak freely and discuss a debate, or for instance, role play and interview, or simply questions and answers and just take a backseat and observe, they didn't feel under pressure to perform in a particular way. They didn't feel that they had to use the past perfect or reported speech that day because we were teaching it for the purpose of the exam. Which brings me to my next point. Yes, you can assess the speaking and listening skills. You can assess how far they have come in terms of retention of vocabulary and form. But writing is equally as important. Written work and feedback doesn't have to be formalised. It can be your students writing about something they feel passionate about. And feedback is really crucial because when somebody writes something, they want you to acknowledge it and they want you to take the time and discuss it with them. It's at that particular time when you find out what you didn't know about the learner. Acting as an observer, sometimes you have to look at the students as an outsider. For instance, if they're doing group work or pair work, what I try to do is just let them be and observe how they work in a group, how they prefer to learn. Are they leaders or do they like to facilitate? Do they like to organise tasks? Do they prefer to write or do they just want to speak? The problem I found with being the observer of this process was that there was too much going on and I couldn't observe every single student or every single group. So what I decided to do is keep a mini journal for myself. I used that as a tool for follow-up action points. For example, tutorials, individual learning plans, classroom learning plans in a whole class tutorial led by the teacher, whereby students are also able to participate. I found that by using the journal it made it a lot easier for me to follow what was going on in my students' minds. The other thing I learned recently was that I had an A2 student who seemed to struggle with speaking and seemed to struggle with reading long texts. By looking at his initial assessment or placement test, I couldn't find anything to work from because it was a bit restricted. It had a set format and it was computerised. I didn't think that perhaps the student in question was under pressure to perform this test in order to be placed in the right level. A student never spoke a word during class, so when he was prompted he would smile and say, could you come back to me later? I'm not ready. Or he would simply say, I don't want to speak. I decided not to put pressure on this particular student. This went on for three months, closer to three months. I would sit with him and work with him during group activities because I didn't want him to feel that he was less able than the rest of the class. When I stopped interfering in his learning process and when I observed him in one of the activities, he was doing most of the talking. He'd never spoken more than one sentence in the past. That's when I decided to have a tutorial and find out why he didn't want to speak. Perhaps there was a serious issue and I could address it. A student just said, I just don't like speaking when I'm prompted. He didn't say when I'm prompted, he was A2. But when the teacher wants me to speak, he liked, and I found out later on, he liked to assimilate and take it all in for weeks on end or perhaps months on end. This language just emerges and it's beautiful and it makes sense. There's form, meets, fluency, and it was beautifully combined. His ideas were so organised. He was talking to me with confidence. It took a tiny observation and a tutorial to find this out. I wouldn't have found out otherwise. I thought that was a learning curve for me. I'm still trying to find out more about informal assessment. Some of the observations were that students were following the informal assessment, whether it was speaking in written form, group work, or keeping journals. Students were able to reflect on their own progress. They would come up to you at the end of the session or on tutorial day and say, I think I'm making progress because I can use this now. There was a sense of collaboration and teamwork between student and teacher, which was quite a nice thing to see. There were surprises. There were things that would crop up. I didn't know, for instance, that one of my students liked to read and write poems because I hadn't used poems with them before, but when I took the time to listen to them in conversation, I found that out because I didn't put any pressure on them to complete this task by this time within 10 minutes because the coursebook said so. It does break the backwash effect for classes such as the first certificate class. If you want to read more about the backwash effect whereby teacher and students are bound by exam class deadlines and structures, it's in Jeremy Harmer's... I think... Does anyone know the name for the Harmer's book? 2010. Thank you. The Practice of English Language Teaching. There's a whole chapter on it. These are some of the statements students came up with. I know the answer. I just don't know how to put sentences together. We may assume that that particular student just can't speak and you don't put pressure on them. Teacher, please correct my mistakes when I speak. Sometimes you don't want to correct a student at every single second whenever they make a mistake, but some students actually prefer that and you don't find this out unless you take the time to assess them while they're speaking with no pressure whatsoever. I feel more relaxed when I communicate naturally and listen to others. This was a first certificate student. She said this after we had done exam practice, exam speaking practice, and then we did an informal conversation whereby they could talk about a certain topic with no criteria as to you need to use this and this language point and this grammar structure or you need to include this vocabulary. Can we talk about my homework? This comes up all the time. It takes a while to get some students to do homework, but once they get into the habit, they will come up to you and say, can you give me more homework or can you check this or check that? I think informal assessment takes a more humanistic approach and it makes you assess the learner as a person and as an individual and it makes you look at learning preferences and see them in a different light. I found that their interest in language increased and what I mean by that is their curiosity and their willingness to go and find things out for themselves. It helped me set learning goals. It was a bit like a contract between student and teacher. We were working towards fluency or achieving this aspect or that aspect of your learning. Of course, students' autonomy increased because then they would know what to go and search for in order to improve their language skills. Speaking tasks and activities for instance became very meaningful so it wasn't about we're doing this for the exam or we're doing this because it was more about there's an ultimate purpose and that's to improve myself as a student. Finally, this brings in this idea for the student that my teacher evaluates my speaking skills. They need to know that you care about what they say and you are taking notes and you are evaluating it and giving them results and solutions. Therefore, I can make progress. Thank you very much.