An analyze of Teacher’s Practices in Using Authentic Assessment in Speaking at Grade XI

of SMA N 12 South Tangerang

Yosi Destira
Yosi.destira@yahoo.co.id

Faculty of Educational Sciences Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University of Jakarta,

Indonesia.
Jl. Ir. H. Juanda No95 Ciputat 15412, Indonesia

Abstract: In curriculum 2013 has been encountered by various challenges. One of that is authentic
assessment. Authentic assessment has been playing an important role in the process of learning
evaluation. It covers three domains namely affective, psychomotor, and cognitive domain The
teacher must use a lot of instruments, which made them quite which are regarded more
complicated. This study aims to find out about the types of oral language assessment used by the
teachers in her practices, the ways in applying those assessment tasks, and the problems faced by
the teachers during the assessment processes. The method used in this research is descriptive. The
data were collected through interviews to the English teacher grade X, analyzing the teacher’s
documents and give the questionnaires to teacher and eight classes of grade X students, and The
finding indicate that (1) the teacher has done several procedures of the authentic assessment, (2)
teachers has varied the oral language assessment tasks, such as storytelling, pictured-cued
description, video clips, information gap, oral interview, role plays and oral reports.

Keywords: Assessment, authentic assessment, teacher’s practice, speaking skill.

INTRODUCTION
The government has published the curriculum 2013 since in academic year 2013/2014.
And nowadays it became the latest curriculum. According to Government Regulation (PP) No.
19/2005 Article 3), curriculum is a set of plans and regulations on the learning objectives, contents,
and materials. It has become guiding for implement of learning activities and to reach certain
objectives. According to Aripin (2009), The changing of Indonesian curriculum into School-based
Curriculum (SBC) has also changed the paradigm of learning activities and assessment process in
terms of the system, principles, approaches, techniques, and assessment types. SBC demanded that
the assessment practice be referred to the Standard of Educational Assessment. The Ministry of
National Education Regulation No. 20/2007 on the Standard of Educational Assessment states that
the assessment principles need to be holistically and continuously applied. Being holistic means
teacher’s assessment should include all of the competence aspects such as cognitive, psychomotor,
and affective and all that should use the appropriate assessment techniques. Being continous means
the assessment is done to monitor the progress of students’ abilities.

Assessment is a complex process that is essential for extending learning, thinking and
communicating with others (Dunsmuir, Clifford and Williams 2003). While, according to Allen
(2004), assessment involves the use of empirical data on student learning to refine programs and
improve student learning. Generally, to know student’s achievement in learning a language and
want to evaluate it the teacher or lecturer will use an authentic assessment. According to Zaim and
Refnaldi (2016), authentic assessment is the way to evaluate students’ learning progress through
numerous assessment tasks. In addition, Brown (2010) also notes, the belief of authenticity
portrays the real-world tasks in which motivate the students to use the language skills in practice
more communicatively. Furthermore, Palm (2008) states that in authentic assessment students
have to relate their background knowledge to deal with an information needed on the topic and
express their ideas in detailed. Thus, it can be assumed that the multiple tasks given in authentic
assessment should reflect to the real world situations and give a chance to the students to do the
tasks meaningfully. Moreover, Authentic assessment concerns with any activities to measure the
learners on what is supposed to be measured, either the process or the outcomes, using any type of
the assessment instruments, which has been set according to the demand of the competences in the
Standard of Competence or Core Competence and Basic Competence (Darling-Hammond &
Snyder, 2000). In authentic assessment, the teachers not only assess the basic competence, but also
the standard of core competence and the graduate competence (De Jong, Steinel, Florijn,
Schoonen, & Hulstijn, 2013). In other words, authentic assessment is the right assessment due to
it is a unit of applying and comprehending various theories in real life situation. In this research
will be focus on authentic assessment in student’s speaking skill. Speaking is one of skills that
necessary to be developed due to this skill is able to encourage the students to applying their
theoretical knowledge into practice or not. As far as we know, in curriculum 2013 the student as a
center and the teacher as a facilitator, it mean student should be active, creative, and innovative in
doing the learning process while the teacher should give good instruction and do the assessment
authentically. However today not all schools are ready to apply the curriculum 2013 may because
some considerations which make the school cannot do that. So, it can bring bad impact to learning
process such as still many problem which related to the oral assessment practices. One of them is
the teacher lack of variation tasks on speaking. Based on it the student become unfamiliar with
other oral assessment activities because of this they will lack of practicing in speaking. Although
they ever read the theories in other place and other occasion it cannot make they be capable on
speaking. And other impact, they were sometimes still get difficulties when they attempt to express
and conveying their ideas orally. In addition, the Ministry of Education and Culture (2012) states,
the development of the curriculum philosophically is to approve the students having the
knowledge, attitudes and skills with them after completing their studies and are able in applying
the knowledge in the real life situation.

This view is definitely affected the learning approach used in the instructional activities. As many
sources mention, the main learning approach used in the instructional activities of the 2013
curriculum is scientific approach. Mu’in et al. (2014: 224) note that there are five principals used
in the scientific approach, namely; observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and
communicating. By using scientific approach, students can develop their creativities because it is
more likely to direct students to search for any information of a certain topic themselves instead
of having teachers make clear on it completely. In addition, they learn to work in groups or in pairs
in order to develop their social competence. Besides, Nur and Madkur (2014: 126) add that
scientific approach is used to promote students’ critical, analytic, investigational, procedural and
communicative competences. According to the Ministry of Education and Culture (2012: 11),
there are two principles in the curriculum development. One of them is that the curriculum must
be related to the real world contexts. Then, the purpose of assessment in learning is to find out and
develop achievement of competence on students. It can be said that the use of scientific approach
in the learning processes in the 2013 curriculum is derived from those principles. In addition, the
ways in assessing students’ learning progress should be authentic, too. Therefore, authentic
assessment is applied in the new curriculum. According to Zaim and Refnaldi (2016), authentic
assessment is the way to evaluate students’ learning progress through numerous assessment tasks.
In addition, Brown (2010: 126) also notes, the belief of authenticity portrays the real-world tasks
in which motivate the students to use the language skills in practice more communicatively.
Furthermore, Palm (2008: 7) states that in authentic assessment students have to relate their
background knowledge to deal with an information needed on the topic and express their ideas in
detailed. Thus, it can be assumed that the multiple tasks given in authentic assessment should
reflect to the real world situations and give a chance to the students to do the tasks meaningfully.
O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 77) note that there are eight types of oral language assessment tasks,
namely: (1) oral interview, (2) picture-cued descriptions or stories, (3) radio broadcasts, (4) video
clips, (5) information gap, (6) story/text retelling, (7) roleplays, (8) oral reports, and (9) debates.
Dealing with those assessment tasks, it seems that picture-cued description, story/text retelling and
oral reports tasks are compatible to be used in assessing students’ speaking skill when they learn
functional/monologue texts. Then, assessment task, like roleplays, seems very common to be used
when students learn transactional texts. Additionally, all oral language assessment tasks above can
be enjoyable for the students if teachers are able to construct the assessment activities as attractive
as possible. By this, students might be more confidence in conveying their ideas orally. There are
several research results related to the teachers’ practices in using the authentic assessment. Zaim
(2013: 60) notes that in the teachers’ practices there were some rubrics which were not appropriate
with the skills to be assessed. In addition, the authentic assessment itself was not fully utilized by
the teachers. Some teachers often assessed students’ progress generally without referring to the
scoring rubrics. Moreover, the lack of assessment guidelines and the needs of teacher’s training on
the implementation of authentic assessment were also noted as the problems in this research.

Based on explanation above, this study aims to find out the types of oral language assessment used
by the grade X teacher of SMA N 12 Tangerang Selatan in assessing students’ speaking skill. It is
also done to find out the ways of teachers in using the assessment tasks in their practices. Some
possible problems during the teachers’ practices are also discussed in this paper.

RESEARCH METHOD

This study will use descriptive in qualitative research. It means that in this research all the findings
gathered would be described as what they were. This research will conduct at grade X of SMA N
12 Tangerang Selatan. There are English teacher and eight classes of grade X students that will
examine in this research. The data will collect through interviews to the English teacher of grade
X, and give the questionnaires to the teacher and eight classes of grade X students, and analyzing
the teacher documents. There are some documents analyzed in this research. They are teacher’s
lesson plans, syllabuses and teacher’s utterances (interview), teacher’s documents, and
questionnaires of teacher and students. In analyzing the data from interview and documentation,
the researcher did several steps suggested by Miles and Huberman (1984) in Sugiyono (2011: 334)
as the following: data reductions, data display and conclusion. In other hands, in analyzing the data
from the questionnaires, the researcher ran SPSS program version 21.

References

Arifin, Z. (2009). Evaluasi pembelajaran. Bandung: Remaja Rosdakarya, 77.

Brown, H. Douglas and Priyanvada Abeywickrama. (2010). Language Assessment: Principles and
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Palm, T. (2008). Performance Assesment and Authentic Assessment: A conceptual Analysis of the
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Darling-Hammond, L., & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and
Teacher Education, 16(5), 523–545.

De Jong, N. H., Steinel, M. P., Florijn, A., Schoonen, R., & Hulstijn, J. H. (2013). Linguistic skills and speaking
fluency in a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34(05), 893–916.

Kemendikbud. (2012). Dokumen Kurikulum 2013. Jakarta: Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan
Desember 2012