New Strategies to assess English Language development of Sri Lankan students: A Proposal

Abstract

Learners’ language development has generally been assessed by conventional methods by the maintenance of reliability and validity. Teachers check students’ knowledge of spelling, appropriate use of vocabulary, grammar through spelling tests, filling in the blanks, vocabulary test, and syntactical structures through jumbled sentences, and reading skills through reading comprehension with ‘Wh’ questions, and written skills through guided and unguided compositions. However, students’ response based on the socio, economic, cultural and psychological aspects are not taken care of. Today’s modern classrooms where students from various backgrounds gather for the purpose of learning do not have any consideration for the poor and slow learner. To aggravate the plight of the students the testing system too, does suppress the feelings of the learners whose living conditions and psychological motivations are poor. This situation leads to a state where students’ interest in learning an alien language has become deplorable. In this context, the researchers is of the view that a methodology using theatre workshop to teach English would be useful in motivating students to learn English beter. The present study conducted with a group of students, twenty-four in number from a Sri Lankan English classroom employing the ethnographical methodology was able to promote the speaking and writing skills of the students who came from a poor background in a war-torn city as was evident from the video-recorded classroom activities and the scripts written by the students after the performance. This paper concentrates on how the assessment was made to prove that language growth occurred because of the use of theatre workshop rather than conventional methods