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pre-conference workshops

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Pre-conference workshops will be held on Thursday the 17th of November 2016. Abstracts for the workshops are listed below.

The registration fee for attending one workshop is NZ$60.  The registration fee for attending two workshops is NZ$100. Registration for the workshops is available as part of the conference registration process.

Morning Session

Matthew Poehner: Dynamic Assessment: Leveraging classroom activities to understand and support learner language development

OR

Ute Knoch: Introduction to Rasch measurement using Winsteps

Afternoon Session

Barry O'Sullivan: Using free online resources to develop reading texts for classroom assessment

OR

Ute Knoch: Introduction to many-facet Rasch measurement


pre-conference Workshop abstracts

Dynamic Assessment: Leveraging classroom activities to understand and support learner language development
Matt Poehner

 
Second/foreign language (L2) teachers are routinely charged with promoting learners’ development in the target language while at the same time conducting formal and informal assessments of progress. These sets of responsibilities are often characterized by different practices and sets of assumptions (e.g., offering learners support when they encounter difficulties may be understood quite differently during instruction versus assessment). In Dynamic Assessment (DA), teaching and assessing are understood as interrelated features of the same activity, one that seeks to promote the development of learner L2 abilities. By jointly engaging with learners in activities that are beyond their current independent functioning, it is possible to reach a diagnosis of their emerging abilities; that is, one can glimpse abilities that have not yet fully developed but that are still ripening. At the same time, the instructional quality of this interaction may serve to continue guiding their development. This workshop is concerned with how both a teaching and an assessment function may be pursued during a given activity. Participants will examine instances of DA interactions to identify some of the ways in which learner abilities may manifest. Principles of probing and prompting through interaction, systematicity, and shifting focus from individual to group, will be highlighted. In addition, participants will be invited to begin to plan how activities from their teaching contexts might be reorganized according to DA principles.

Introduction to Rasch measurement using Winsteps
Ute Knoch


This workshop aims to provide participants with an introduction to the basic Rasch model. The session will include a mixture of theory and hands-on practice. Differences between classical test theory and modern test theory will be explored. The use of the statistical software Winsteps will be demonstrated and participants will have plenty of opportunity to gain hands-on experience with using the software using data provided in the workshop. The interpretation of the output of a Rasch analysis will be one of the key foci of the session. Participants are also able to bring their own data sets to the workshop. No prior knowledge is required and participants are not required to have an understanding of statistics or mathematics.
 
Using free online resources to develop reading texts for classroom assessment
Barry O'Sullivan


Selecting appropriate texts for use in tests and for classroom activities is a critical part of a teacher’s work. It’s pretty easy to think about some of the issues that need to be considered: length, topic, difficulty. The first two of these are easily dealt with. Count the words. Know your students. The third, however, causes teachers the most grief. How can we know in advance how difficult the students are likely to find the text? Unless we can predict, even roughly, the difficulty it becomes extremely problematic to use a text meaningfully in a test.
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Some language testing companies have been dealing with this problem in a systematic way for years, others still take a “we’re the experts, we just know” approach. In my own work, I don’t like to leave anything to chance and like to have as much information about a text as I possibly can before I even consider using it in a test. I very much believe that we should work hard to establish some measures of texts to help build a picture of its likely difficulty. Luckily, there are a number of resources available to the teacher and tester that are free and generally quite easy to use.

In this workshop, we will work with a number of these resources to build a useful picture of what an ideal text should look like. Using materials supplied by participants, we will create a specification template that is targeted at specific classes or groups of learners. Participants are asked to bring along a number of texts that have been successfully used for a specific class or level in the past (4 to 6 would be good) as these will be used to build the specification.

Introduction to many-facet Rasch measurement
Ute Knoch


This workshop aims to provide participants with an introduction to many-facet Rasch measurement using Facets. The session will include a mixture of theory and hands-on practice. Differences between classical test theory and modern test theory will be explored, with a particular focus on understanding the effects raters can have on the outcomes of an assessment. The use of the statistical software Facets will be demonstrated and the interpretation of the output will be explored using data provided in the workshop. Participants are also able to bring their own data sets to the workshop. No prior knowledge is required and participants are not required to have an understanding of statistics or mathematics.