Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Classroom language assessment aims to gather various types of information related to student language learning and use and use it to inform a range of formative-summative decisions, including how to provide feedback to help students improve their learning efficacy, what teaching adjustments are needed, and whether students have demonstrated their learning attainment defined by a given syllabus (Turner, 2012). This article presents five golden rules based on the contributions of JD Brown. These golden rules address a need for a practical and accessible assessment approach that helps language teachers effectively assess students’ learning achievement in the language classroom. This article is, therefore, written for language teachers and pre-service TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) students. The five golden rules presented in this article are: (1) choose the suitable types of language assessment tasks; (2) recognise the two types of assessment interpretations; (3) consider and apply basic classical test theory for analysis of the assessment of learning; (4) develop well-defined assessment criteria and rubrics for judging students’ performance; and (5) use assessment of language learning as a source of feedback to improve assessment tasks and student learning.