TALKING ABOUT ASSESMENT

As it can be seen in the first part of the document, second language evaluation involves many different kinds of decisions which take place in different scenarios. And in those 

scenarios evaluation is crucial, not to know if you approve or fail but to be aware if your English level is enough to face a next level in a job or in a learning programme.

Decisions play an important role in evaluation, as the teacher perhaps grades students through texts and exams and unexpectedly a really good student fails the course and the teacher knows that this student has a great level , in that case the teacher has to make a decision and choose between giving a chance to prove the student wrong or just fail him without taking into account what his knowledge is.

What is the importance of evaluation? What can be inferred from the results? Who are the participants? Those are questions that may lead us to have a comprehensive difiniton of what evaluation is. We may think that is necesary to test someone to know if the lessons were learned, but sometimes observation is enough to prove the student skills on what its being taught. From an own case, I can say that testing serves mainly to have tangible data of the students process, but the actual grades are given from the performance shown by the student during the whole process of learning.