NEWSLETTER No 1

December 2015

Dear Teachers, Lecturers, Instructors, Educationalists and Examiners,

Do you sometimes witness, in your daily teaching practice, a student/learner who casts a glance at the grade for  his/her assignment that you have just marked and, then, he/she chucks it into his/her backpack having neither analysed the mistakes nor read your comments? Do you sometimes wonder when and how to correct your students’ mistakes in their speaking activities? Do you sometimes get the impression that your comments and instructions fall on deaf ears? Do you have the feeling that the students or learners keep making the same mistakes and ‘they just couldn’t care less’ and you’re wasting  your breath trying to talk to them?

Are you prepared to rethink your methods of assessing the students, which may lead to you seeing that the glass is half full rather than  half empty? If you are, then…

We would like to introduce to you the project ‘FAB – Formative Assessment  Benchmarking for Foreign Language Learning &Teaching’, which commenced in October 2015 at the Centre for Foreign Language Teaching, University of Warsaw, as part of  Erasmus+, Action 2.

The aim of our Project is to promote  FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT in the field of foreign language teaching for academic purposes (although we hope that all foreign language teachers and instructors may get interested in the project). We will especially focus  on speaking and the methods of assessing this skill in terms of communicating  in a foreign language.

You can find information about the higher education institutions that are taking  part in the FAB project here.

To find out more about what FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT is click here.

Being both teachers from  the Centre for Foreign Language Teaching and  FAB Project coordinators, we would like to regularly provide you with information about our activities and plans, and to share the outcomes of our work connected with FAB with you. We would like our newsletter,  website and  Facebook profile to contain reliable information about what people write about and discuss in reference to FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT in Poland and throughout  the world. This  is why we would like to invite you to share information about any events that are going to take place or publications about to be published concerning FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT.

We often ask ourselves this  question: how can we  assess students in a good way? And what does GOOD mean – fair, effective, motivating? At the same time, our students/learners frequently ask themselves: why does he/she assess me? In order to explore  these issues, we would like to invite you to look at  the introductory questionnaire for students and teachers (available in English, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Polish.)

Drawing on the questionnaire, you will be able to analyse your students’ needs and to reflect on the way you assess them,  the significance of feedback, the methodology of class/group work and  how to create a motivating environment in the classroom and other teaching-learning environments.   Please feel free to download and make use of these documents.

If you would like to receive our newsletter, please contact us at:

faberasmus@uw.edu.pl

We hope FAB provides inspiration for your teaching.

Best wishes from

The FAB Team – University of Warsaw