In AI, the movie by Steven Spielberg, the robot child named David attains what most experts consider almost impossible for AI to achieve, the ability to love. With this level of technology, it would be possible for AI graders to assess every aspect of test takers’ speaking skills.

In the last article, I discussed English education up until college admission and pointed out some problems—most notably how unbalanced assessments affect the ways young people study English.
Here, I would like to mention the status of college education in our country.

When we think of assessment and language education with very young learners and young learners, a range of questions come to our mind.

The elaboration, adaptation and administration of self-assessment tools for use with novice teachers during their practicum at the Language Center (CL) of the Espirito Santo Federal University grew out of primary needs for supportive approaches to teacher training and development.

Many educators, including myself, have pointed out that Japanese English education’s ineffectiveness is largely due to the existing assessment systems. While the world looks to four-skills assessment or even four-skills-integrated assessment, Japan is still struggling to introduce the modern-day speaking assessment…

As a non-native English teacher, I have always carried magnifying glasses so as to spot general errors, subject-verb agreement, misplaced commas and/or slips of the like. Not much long ago, I realized that marking a piece of writing that is “unclear” to me involves more than just narrowing my feedback down to linguistic non-conformity.

Earlier this year, as schools around the world (of course, mine included) prepared to shift their activities and classes from face-to-face to (some 100%, others partially) virtual mode, I wrote a text1 using the GPS metaphor, which should, then, guide the way through the not-much-traveled roads and lead us “home”. The overarching argument of this essay is that the driving forces that should calibrate/orient the GPS to take us up and down these roads are the much-known principles of assessment.