Assessing Written English Language at School in Uzbekistan

Assessing written English language at school in Uzbekistan

Оценка письменного английского языка в школе в Узбекистане

Шукурова Дилноза Тураевна

Узбекский государственный университет мировых языков

Сагатова Муборак

Узбекский государственный университет мировых языков

Annotation. The article studies the ways of assessment of written works in a school in Uzbekistan context. It explores the strategies of assessment the writing skills according to the standards of Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)

Key words: implementation of CEFR, assessment criteria, testing written language, the assignments, inaccuracies, to evaluate, instrument of assessment

Аннотация. В статье рассматриваются способы оценки письменных работ в школе в контексте Узбекистана. В нем рассматриваются стратегии оценки навыков письма в соответствии со стандартами Общеевропейской системы координат (CEFR).

Ключевые слова: осуществление CEFR, критерии оценки, тестирование письменной речи, заданиях, неточность, оценки, инструмент оценки

Educational field of Uzbekistan has changed considerably after the adoption of the Uzbekistan’s Development Strategy for 2017-2021. Tutoring and studying foreign languages, namely English became a crucial topic throughout the country’s educational places, such as schools. The great change which is simultaneously being investigated is CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) for assessing foreign languages. According to the standards, all the teaching materials at language areas should be referred to CEFR while teaching at the educational places, starting from schools and ending with the higher educational institutions. In terms of assessment it must also be referred to CEFR can do statements for different language skills.

Now one can see what changes are going to be done in the country’s educational institutions. The State Education Standards will have to be reconsidered, actually new syllabuses and curricula, course-books will have to be developed, approved formally by government organizations and published. The general foreign language (basic and general English, German, and French and so on) is planned to finish at school and starting from lyceums and colleges including Universities foreign languages for special purposes will be taught. One more positive thing is the implementation of CEFR in teaching foreign languages. Now it is officially established that the requirements of A-l and A-2 will be met by the end of the ninth grade at school, B-l-within three years in academic lyceums and professional colleges, B-2- at non-philological Universities and C-l at special philological Universities where teachers of foreign languages are trained.

In this case, it should be observed deeply into the writing assessment criteria:

One of the most initial characteristics of evaluation of writing is that teachers ought to present various types of tasks to their pupils on writing:

Written – spoken tasks such as message, letter, e-mail;

Formal proses such as essay, article, and report

Four independent assessment criteria could serve as a base for the evaluation of the writing test in educational areas of the country:

1.  Total impression, register and task filling

2.  Logical connection, fluency and organization

3.  Control and range of vocabulary

4.  Grammatical structure and accuracy

According to fair assessing criteria of written tasks, language teachers should increase the following guidelines for testing written language in education:

• The main goal of the test would be overall proficiency, for a specific purpose.
• The clarification of assessment background in testing may include several causes for improving the test, an explanation of the suite of which this evaluation is a part, or other sort of such sources.
• Acquired skills, significantly writing, which are involved in the fulfilling of this assignment (regardless of whether they are explicitly understood at the rating level).
• Describing the criteria of marks are distributed in the exact part of the study process of the task and what kind of candidates would be required to include acquiring overall marks on this assignment.
• Explanation of rating systems of writing task (e.g. clerically, machine marked), what sort of educational tools are used and what kind of aspects are considered when deciding pupil’s language grade.
• Mark out the measures taken to ensure writing assignments are established at the qualified level of learners. This explanation could contain the procedure of question paper producing and trialling.
•  If the time management is not specified, expected time.
• The formation of written language task should be selected: letter (business), letter (personal), review, academic essay, composition, report, story, proposal, article, form, other (specify).
• Several functions which could be expected in the answer sheet. Choose from: clarifying (events), characterize (processes), narrating, commentating, expositing, explaining, demonstrating, instructing, arguing, persuading, reporting events, giving opinions, making complaints, suggesting, comparing and contrasting, exemplifying, evaluating, expressing possibility/probability, summarising, other.
• The theme or topic. Choose from: personal identification, house and home/environment, daily life, free time/entertainment, travel, relations with other people, health and body care, education, shopping, food and drink, services, places, language, weather, other
• The expected goal of the answer. Choose from: referential (to give ‘objective’ clues related to the world), emotive (to characterize the emotional state of the author), conative (to persuade the reader), phatic (to establish or maintain social interaction with the reader), meta lingual (to clarify or verify understanding), poetic (writing language for aesthetic purposes).
• State the criteria with the help of marking system. Choose from: grammatical range, grammatical accuracy, lexical range and at the same time lexical accuracy, cohesion of structural connection and coherence of logical linking, content/task achievement, improvement of opinions, orthography, other (specify).

In order to evaluate the fulfilment of the assignments it could be better if the tutors of schools assessment the accuracy of the pupil’s written task according to the given correction codes:

Above we can observe one example of the evaluated written assignment. After checking, learners should be presented their works so that, they could understand what inaccuracies they have got.