Bodrum Course 2015

Designing and Marking Tests for the Productive Skills ‘Writing and speaking’ 27 July – 1 August 2015
 
 How do participants gain from the programme?
 
This practical course is ideal for teachers wishing to design or improve their current speaking and writing tests. You will look into reasons for testing productive skills, what should be tested, how this can be tested, and practical as well as academic considerations for marking. You will be equipped to critically evaluate your own tests of productive skills and their marking procedures, and gain an insight into how these can be further improved upon.
 
 
This course offers: A practical guide for test construction, task design and marking for the productive skills; A chance to discuss and evaluate your own productive tests (please bring with you any materials that you would be happy to share); Ample hands-on opportunities to work on productive test design and delivery.

Who is the programme designed for?
This programme has been developed for ELT professionals working at all levels and with different age groups, who are keen to develop their understandings and abilities in applying the latest developments in:
 
Understanding the key principles underlying good practice in productive testing Developing the ability to write good test tasks Designing and producing a variety of productive assessment instruments Providing leadership in their institution in the field of productive test design Managing their own continuing professional development in TEA

Core themes include:

• Construct design: What are we trying to test in speaking and writing?
• Content design: How can we get a representative sample of appropriate language from students?
• Task construction: How to design effective tasks
• Testing Vs Assessment of productive skills
• The role of the interlocutor 
• Designing criteria and giving criteria meaning
• Inter and Intra rater/marker reliability
• Critical reviews of productive tests
• The practicalities of productive testing

 
 Time will be built into the course for reflection and for participants to consider how to adapt ideas from the course to classrooms in their own professional contexts.
 
All course participants receive a pre-course questionnaire, which should be returned prior to the course. This is to ensure that the areas of most relevance to participants are covered. The main strands of the course will be carefully integrated.


Meeting the Challenges of Academic Teaching in the 21st Century: A critical examination of 9 major trends that are shaping education today
 
Aims of the Course
Education today is going through unprecedented, rapid and dramatic change. For the busy university teacher, keeping up with all the latest developments in education can be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Nonetheless, it is vital for university teachers to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field in order to meet the challenges of academic teaching in the 21st century. However, we do not want to naïvely adopt the latest educational trends without first critically examining the pedagogical implications of these new approaches. The purpose of this course, therefore, is to critically evaluate the extent to which some of the latest trends in education can be utilized to improve teaching and learning.
 
We begin by examining the changing face of education, specifically the key forces that are shaping education, and what 21st century classrooms look like. We then move on to critically examine the nine critical trends that have emerged on the educational landscape in recent years, and consider the extent to which these new approaches meet the challenges that we, as academic teachers, face each day in the classroom. The nine critical trends that will be examined are: Big Data and Learning Analytics; Differentiated Instruction; The Flipped Classroom; Information literacy; Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) and Social Media; Rhetorical Patterns in Academic Writing; Gamification; Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); and Computerized Testing.