ABSTRACT
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
In this part of the paper, the researcher will discuss about the authentic assessment and the implementation toward reading skill in the Indonesian context based on several prior studies.
3.1 Authentic assessment for EFL learners in ELT context
When we talk about English as a Foreign Language, we cannot discuss it in isolation from the context of English Language Teaching as a whole. This includes the analysis of student needs, the circumstances, the learning management, the goals, the implementation, and even the assessment stage [15]. To better assist the academic accomplishments of English language students, Indonesia, which is one of the nations that have students who are classified as L2 learners, has to pay attention to the aforementioned aspects. Assessment is a continuous procedure that incorporates a considerably broader scope of the teaching and learning process that should be a consideration for the teacher [16].
In addition, Martika and Zaim [7] stated that assessment is an essential component of the academic environment since it is key to the learning process and enables instructors to assess the students under their attention in terms of students' development, skills, and responsibilities toward their learning process.
A successful assessment does not simply evaluate one aspect; rather, it must also cover, in a comprehensive manner, all aspects of the learner's development, including cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor aspects [15]. Kinay [16] stated that a successful assessment must be in keeping with the primary aims of education, which are to cultivate persons who are capable of solving issues, whether those problems pertain to the themes or material covered in school or to challenges they encounter in their everyday life. Recently, due to the fact that the new curriculum was implemented in 2013, in Indonesia as an L2 country, there has been a rise in the popularity of a particular kind of assessment known as authentic assessment, which places emphasis on the aforementioned three aspects. Aliningsih and Sofwan [17] added that authentic assessment has emerged as an essential component of the educational system now in existence in Indonesia. Subsequently, instructors began becoming involved with the assessment strategy to accomplish the learning objectives and meet students’ needs, especially in four major language skills, namely speaking, reading, writing, and listening.
While we discuss the term authentic assessment, it is actually referring to the meaning of the word
“authentic” itself as the original, reflective, genuine, to the real-world situation or cases as the characteristic for the process of assessing by using authentic assessment [17]. This term is first appeared and stated by Wiggins in 1991 [18] as a synthesis between learning and evaluations to make sure that the requirements of the pupils are being fulfilled. Authentic assessments can be developed by instructors by first determining the criteria for student performance, then selecting authentic tasks and splitting them from traditional tasks, then determining the criteria for the task itself, and finally
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developing a rubric to evaluate student performance. Students have the chance to strengthen their critical thinking abilities via participation in productive assessment activities such as writing and speaking when they take part in authentic assessments.
According to the Herrington [19] statement, there are four core areas in authentic assessment. The first is the context, which should represent the actual world situation. The next is student's involvement in executing their learned information and crafting a product utilizing that understanding, the next is real activity that corresponds to the assessment should be effortlessly connected with the activity, and the final one is indicators that offer a measuring system on the students' development throughout the assessment. An authentic assessment will also contain the significant activities, which will allow for a complete evaluation of the students' knowledge as well as their abilities [20]. This sort of assessment has effectively become the alternative for educators and teachers to complete their evaluation process since it is assessing based on the cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor aspects of the students while they are engaged in the process of learning. That is the most notable difference between an authentic assessment and a traditional assessment, which exclusively focuses on evaluating the cognitive aspects of pupils. Authentic assessments are more in-depth than traditional assessments. Imagine we as a teacher taught our students to play soccer and then we assess their competency level by using a pencil and paper test in the form of multiple choice instead of asking them to perform the real activity, that is playing soccer game in the field.
Those three aforementioned aspects play an important role and should be considered when evaluating the outcomes of EFL students' learning processes. The cognitive aspect implies the implementation of the brain functions as an intellectual tool, including remembering, recognizing, identifying, understanding, and creating something. This aspect indicates the students’ competence to grasp the meaningful context of their learning process and their ability to apply their understanding based on what they have obtained during the learning process [21]. Kasilingam [22] and Kinay [16] stated that This aspect might be assessed by conducting a number of different approaches or activities, such as having students discuss and debate topics, administering quizzes, and focusing on problem-solving- focused tasks. He also argued two other aspects, the emotional aspect and psychomotor aspect. The emotional aspect is the domain that concentrates on response, motivation, the willingness to engage, and appraisal of what has been learned so that it may subsequently be related to values in real life. This is in contrast to cognitive domains, which are domains that focus on thinking and brain function. While the psychomotor aspect refers to the physical skills involved in doing tasks with precision, fluency, and rapidity. The stages that occur inside the psychomotor aspect begin with the actions of acting, coordinating, forming, and producing [21], [22]. Based on those motives, EFL learners will have an enormous chance to take account of their own learning and become independent language users and learners since they were exposed to various teaching aspects in authentic assessment [15].
3.2 Teaching reading in the Indonesian context
Reading is a highly significant activity that both teachers and learners are required to engage in over the course of their academic careers. The function of the instructor as a mediator between the students in their capacity as readers and the reading text in its capacity as their educational resource is frequently crucial. Reading is considered to be a receptive skill since it does not need the direct production of linguistic expressions from the learner, in contrast to speaking and writing. Learners start a process of acquiring a new language by reading linguistic elements and absorbing the information in their brains [23]. According to Bambang [24], there are two distinct types of reading: the first is initial reading, and the second is reading comprehension. Readers who are just starting out in the reading process are said to be "initially reading," which refers to the efforts such readers put out. The ability to read letters and words, symbols, phrases, and sentences is something that beginning readers are still gaining. On the other hand, reading comprehension is often an activity that is designed to grasp a certain text, beginning with the literal interpretation of sentences and moving all the way up to the interpretive meaning of the complete text.
People are equipped to gain at least one language as a natural part of their social development so that they can communicate with one another, but they are not necessarily taught to read. People are not going to be able to read once they do never learn how to read. Thus, reading is something that has to be
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taught to them and learned on purpose. Because of this, starting reading instruction at the youngest age is very important and should not be ignored [9].
However, we need to recognize that teaching reading in the L1 and L2 contexts are different. Grabe [25]
argued several differences that should be a consideration for the teacher when it comes to teaching reading in the L2 context, (1) When learners first start reading in their second language, they have a significantly more limited linguistic knowledge base. They have a narrower vocabulary, grammar, and understanding of the structure of conversation (2) Reading in a second language will feel quite different to students of a second language due to the fact that they have already read in two languages and that their cognitive processing will include two language systems (3) When reading in the L2, readers of the second language depend on a variety of various combinations of previous general information. Reading experiences in L1 and L2 may often be quite different when it comes to drawing on knowledge about
"how the reality of the world." (4). When they read L2 literature, readers of the second language will come across many social and cultural beliefs which they may not be acquainted with or find rather challenging to accept. In fact, the basic cognitive processes engaged in L1 and L2 readings are typically the same. Language limits and processing training limitations will result in significant L1—L2 gaps [25].
The majority of schools and colleges in Indonesia demand their students to be able to grasp the English language better and continue to enhance it throughout the course of their education. This responsibility was necessary for the student to be able to grasp the instructional material as well as academic texts, which were mostly written in English. Masduqi [23] stated despite the fact that reading is required at every level of instruction, there has been a consistent downward trend in students' reading levels over the last few decades. This is due to a number of factors, some of which are the level of anxiety that students have when learning English as a foreign language [26]; a lack of motivation in reading [9]; a limitation of students' vocabulary [27]; a lack of practice; and an inadequate resources and methodologies used by teachers to involve students in the process of learning English, particularly reading [28]. Because of this, it is expected that the implementation of authentic assessment would be able to alleviate some of the difficulties encountered by EFL students in Indonesia when they are in the process of acquiring English language skills [1], [5], [29].
3.3 Authentic assessment of reading
When we discuss authentic methods of evaluation, we will likely come across a wide variety of approaches, each of which has the potential to be included in various aspects of education. For the purpose of determining the level of reading proficiency possessed by the student, we will be given a variety of authentic assessment options such as self-and peer-assessment [1], scaffolding model [30], [31], text-based method [32], and by using reading proficiency [7]. The purpose of these various types of evaluation is to get students into the habit of reading on a regular basis, which will make it simpler for them to comprehend material that is more challenging in future occasions [9].
The self-evaluation principle is the capacity to define one's own objectives both inside and outside of the framework of a teaching curriculum and to autonomously monitor that achievement that stands out as one of the fundamental core elements of effective learning. The formation of intrinsic motivation is critical in this kind of evaluation. On the other hand, peer evaluation formed with essentially identical principles, the primary difference being the growth and focus placed on learning in collaboration with peers. The advantage of participating in this community of learning is that it expands the options available to students for expressing their thoughts and doing evaluations, and it also enables students to learn from one another. This evaluation strategy places emphasis on student-centered and on collaborative learning among the students [1].
Scaffolding is inexorably related to the ZPD, and the ZPD is inexorably connected to the scaffolding.
The ZPD, or Zone of Proximal Development, is the gap that exists between the capacity to accomplish activities independently and the inability to complete tasks independently. Students may improve their reading comprehension via the use of scaffolding in one of six different ways: modeling, contextualization, schema formation, textual representation, and metacognitive strategies development.
Scaffolding is also articulated as assistance that instructors are equipped at the moment that students are incapable of performing their assignments on their own. As long as the students are capable enough, the teacher will let them decide what they are going to do with their assignment. Furthermore, students
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learn how to become more self-sufficient in the process of finding information from teacher-assigned tasks via the use of this method [30].
The text-based method is actually a combination of several different assessment techniques, such as asking students to make a summary based on the types of texts such as poetry, short stories, dramas, novels, or academic essays, and then having students present the results of their summary in front of the class, while the teacher observes through the text, question and answer and students' responses, as well as their understanding of the text. An assessment rubric may be used as a measuring tool for student success while carrying out this kind of evaluation of the student's work [32].
Reading proficiency is linked to a number of activities, some of which require skimming and scanning techniques. This approach allows for the implementation of three primary tasks, which are as follows:
(1) relaying or exposing meaning from the literature; (2) analyzing the relevant context from the text;
and (3) commenting on and assessing what they have read [7].
3.4 Challenges in performing authentic assessment toward reading skill in the Indonesian context
Although authentic assessment provides a more thorough assessment model on crucial components or areas that must be assessed for students, such as cognitive area, emotional area, and psychomotor area, we cannot dispute that both conventional and authentic assessments have flaws that must be recognized and addressed in their implementation. Several prior research have identified some of the difficulties of authentic evaluation, particularly in EFL classes for both students and teachers.
The first obstacle that teachers have when adopting authentic assessment in their classroom is that it is a time-consuming activity that requires them to do more work [33]; they must prepare all of the content as real as possible and also the scoring rubric. Not only that but the instructor is still required to assess students' work individually using a rubric. It will be easy if there are just a few students, although it will be quite different if there are more than 50 students. Tono [15] and James [34] mentioned in their study that the worst situation is when the instructor has 12 classes with 432 pupils, which will generate evaluator bias since a lot of time and energy is spent. The possible move to overcome these issues is by giving a teacher only a few classes, if possible, less than five classes so that it will be easier for the teacher to implement authentic assessments.
Inadequate support from the circumstances also becomes the next challenge in implementing the authentic assessment. Abdul Aziz et al. [33] clearly stated the worst effect of inadequate support from the school administration for the authentic assessment would lead to the teachers’ frustration because they also need to do school administration and scoring students’ results. On the other side, the students’
parents also say that their children got low scores even though the teacher already showed them the students’ portfolios with a satisfying outcome. The frustrated teacher may lead to their interest in creating and implementing conventional assessment as long as it is simpler instead of authentic assessment.
In relation to previous challenges, the inadequacy of supporting resources will become a burden for both teachers and students in implementing the authentic assessment. The resources here refer to time and cost during the preparation and implementation until the finalization. Hart [35] stated that authentic assessments might need, or give the impression that they necessitate, a higher contribution of time and money is needed than conventional forms of evaluation. Furthermore, this issue can be overcome by choosing activities on a smaller scale, for which there is comparatively less time and financial assistance, and presenting a breakdown of the tasks at hand together with distinct timelines for their completion [34].
Authentic assessments sometimes include working in groups and placing a greater focus on language;
this might be difficult for certain students to manage because of the nature of the evaluation. Students could also believe that their varied skill sets and degrees of experience in the actual world can have an effect on the result they get [34]. Inadequacy of practices by students because lots of school activities during the weekends also causes an effect in the form of students’ lack of mastery in some language aspects that lead them to difficulty in understanding the assignment [7], [33].
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