Speaker
Description
Formative assessment is often conceptualised as a process in which teachers elicit, interpret, and use evidence of student learning to inform instructional decisions. In contexts transitioning from EFL to ESL, where there is an increasing emphasis on meaningful communication and learner participation, this process becomes particularly important yet challenging. However, in many classrooms, formative assessment remains limited by a focus on correctness and by evidence drawn from only a small number of student responses.
This session reframes formative assessment as a shift from student answers to student thinking, and explores how classroom interaction can be used to make that thinking visible. Drawing on the formative assessment framework developed by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, the session examines how everyday instructional practices—such as questioning, whole-class response routines, and short learning tasks—can be designed and adapted to elicit richer evidence of learning in real time.
Participants will analyse brief classroom interactional episodes to identify how different patterns of student responses reveal varying levels of understanding and misunderstanding, and how such evidence can inform immediate teaching decisions. The session also models a small set of practical, repeatable routines that can be applied directly in ESL classrooms.
By shifting the focus from correctness to thinking, this session highlights how formative assessment can support more responsive and inclusive teaching practices in communicative ESL-oriented classrooms.
Biography
Nguyen Thi Hai Yen is a doctoral candidate in the Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership, Curriculum and Instruction programme at Evangel University, United States. She brings over a decade of experience in leading instructional practices and teaching English across public and private schools and language centres in Vietnam, working with both young learners and adults. Her work focuses on improving the quality of teaching and learning in ESL classrooms, with particular attention to formative assessment, classroom interaction, and young learners’ speaking development. Her academic interests lie in ecological perspectives on language learning, especially in understanding how classroom environments create and shape opportunities for meaningful language use. She is particularly interested in how teachers can notice, interpret, and respond to these opportunities in real time, and how such opportunities are perceived and taken up by learners during classroom interaction to support more responsive and effective English language teaching.
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