The importance of assessment done by students towards English teaching processes as a foreign language at UIS

This is my post for this week, which is about the assessment of students on teaching performance.

     Nowadays, people claim, according to the literature, that teaching practice have gone through a transforming process by new emerging pedagogical trends, which have generated a great impact in students community. However, the innovative pedagogical proposals in the daily teaching practice are still elusive. We can elucidate an accurate example of the incongruence between theory and practice: training foreign language teachers under the premise of the action approach from the Common European Framework of Reference, in which the student is the main character of the teaching-learning process. Nevertheless, some professors keep applying a traditional methodology or, in other cases, an obsolete assessment.           
        In view of the above, this problem can be noticed when university students exacerbate the expression plan of language and judge their proficiency based on grammatical and phonetic precepts. Moreover, it can be seen graduated students from state universities begin performing their teaching careers and have to cope with problems on topics to cover and assess. The first obstacle to overcome is balancing the incongruence existing between pedagogical and didactic theories learnt at school and the scope managed by state institutions and its workers. The second obstacle stems on assessment processes, which are the compendium of the reflection on the overall pedagogical performance since the instruction planning and yearly disciplinary projects until the closure ceremony, interconnecting the pedagogical model with students’ needs and difficulties. In these processes, it can be complex for teachers to do a conscientious follow-up of assessment, since it requires more time to reflect on factors: initial (objectives), procedural and final (products or outcomes) and, beyond that, the time dedicated to this purpose is not remunerated. Therefore, some professors opt for traditional summative evaluation per terms that ends up more practical and less exhausting when grading and giving a final feedback on the bulletin, but inaccurately describing learning processes (since it is reduced quantitatively with some general comments).     
         This problematic discerns that foreign language teaching, in the Colombian case, English, in public universities have not been so successful as it was expected from teaching trainings to foster the implementation of new pedagogical theories in class. Therefore, it would be of paramount importance to analyze the perspectives students have towards teaching performance. According to the literature, a lot of theory have been written about methodology, methods, teachers advises, but we have not focused that much on students viewpoint on the foreign language teaching process in our context. In general, people tend to reform materials, apply new teaching-learning strategies and implement new artifacts of mediation as ITC’s or other objects acting as input, but in few cases students’ voice has little room in the decision making process about methodology, assessment and teaching methods. At our university, we can perceive that we have only a student spokesman and a final biased questionnaire superficially evaluating teaching performance, leaving important information unsaid.    
     This is why, all of students should stand up for our rights and make our directors and professors listen to our voices, dialogue, argue and advance in real and small changes with solid arguments, talking about the problems we mention on a daily basis in our classroom but still remain in the anonymity. On the other hand, we should avoid violence, lousy or ab-hominen arguments that only trigger a conflictive environment. In conclusion, we should apply the popular Latin saying: “Vox populi vox Dei”, in other words, we have to speak up with serious proposals to make real changes in teaching assessment and in other issues that affect our institution.