Authentic assessment in developing students’ Еnglish language skills

The research study devotes to using authenticity in the evaluation of students' English language skills at the initial stage of higher education. The purpose of this research paper is to describe methods for measuring students' productive English language skills using authentic tests or task items. Another aim is to present modern authentic assessment tools that are effective in measuring language skills, such as case studies, simulations, portfolios, observations, performances, journals, essays, presentations, and projects that are close to real-life situations in learning. It is known that students who have recently started university learn English more from textbooks or from test assignments. This makes understanding the real world difficult for them. Moreover, the students are shy and have psychological difficulties interpreting real-life situations as authentic studies. Highlighting teachers' problems, it should be stated that it is difficult to create authentic assessment tasks for scoring language skills for them. During the evaluation process observation, interviews, essays, journal writing, and portfolios are not preferred valuable tools. The research study will boost originality in the contextual language as a more significant expectation of a higher education level. Therefore, authentic assessment describes all requirements that to be closer to reality in the development of fluency and effective listening skills. The research study enrolled twenty-four (16 girls and 8 boys) sophomore students and five (5) teachers to solve all these challenges. Data collection explores the variables such as age, gender, interest in originality, and the number of class hours were all considered during the research process. Observation, interviews, and mixed-type (quantitative and qualitative) methods were used during the experiment. This paper has achieved its objective of applying authentic assessment in teaching English. The finding revealed that teachers did not regard authentic assessment as norm-based assessment. Then, the psychological aspects of authentic assessment were unknown to the students. It should be claimed that the assessment of language skills using a variety of interesting authentic methods encourages students to use English effectively. Furthermore, the teachers were able to design the language assessment criteria by applying authentic tools.