Assessment is one of the knottiest topics in Second Language teaching because it is so time consuming to conduct. Students display a myriad of language "errors" all requiring remediation, and to keep track of one's students' langauge competence can be daunting at best, and impossible even on a good day.

While working at Phambili High School, I developed a system for recording student errors. This involved filling in forms which recorded competency in written performance for each teaching point over the course of a year, and records of when each criterion was "met". I must admit that the system, although workable in that I could get a fairly good fix on where a student was "at", was laborious and difficult to sustain. I used to build up horrific backlogs, and the benefits of the sytem would only really emerge at PTSA meetings where I could describe a child's performance in some detail. I have never applied the grid to oral competence, because I was much less worried about students' oral performance than their written production, but obviously this could quite easily be done.

I used to run a programme once a week in which each student worked through self-run, self-assessed worksheets based on the errors they had displayed, but matching errors to progress was difficult as my book-keeping was seldom up-to-date enough to allow for a smooth running of the programme. I was always chasing my tail and couldn't help getting annoyed with the type of student who would polish off a worksheet in a few minutes and would need to be assisted two or three times in a lesson. There were simply too many students in my class (average 40+), too few minutes in a week to devise new worksheets, and too little photocopy budget to run the programme successfully.

At St Enda's I was able to run the programme more successfully, with lower class sizes, more photocopy budget, and a few years worksheets to make the task less onerous! But then my hard-drive crashed...and I was left with only battered copies of all my worksheets and a useless corrupted backup diskette! As I began to have children of my own, I had no time to replicate all the work of my bachelorhood, all over again! I needed something else, something simpler, something more accomodating of a teacher whose priorities now lay with his own family...

In any case I was coming to the realisation that in my ESL classrooms, the types of errors committed were by-and-large the same across the board, and most students ended up taking the same remediation in any case. And so, I came up with the grid. The idea behind the grid was to have a simplified record of a student's competence at any one time - a kind of snapshot giving a complete picture of a student's progress at that point. I thus seperated the issue of remedial work, using my remedial worksheets now under the assumption that all students would complete every worksheet through the course of a year.

The Grid now became simply a diagnostic and reporting tool. At the beginning of every term I take in a piece of free writing from each student's portfolio and assess it against the grid, making crosses where applicable to describe the student's writing competence, taking note of progress or deterioration.

I have found that the grid allows me rapidly to assess quite a lot about a student's performance in a single assessment. It is not as time consuming as writing out specific errors, but does not lose that much in accuracy of impression. In my experience so many students share the same types of errors, that recording each one separately really serves little purpose. The grid allows one to see at a glance whether a student is using complex sentences with a varied vocabulary, but poor spelling, say, or simple, accurate sentences with good spelling. The reason for including gender in the Concord section is because many junior secondary students in South Africa use male and female pronouns interchangeably.

I am sure that this grid can be improved - every year I tinker with it a little, but I heartily recommend using a grid rather than some record-keeping system which requires the teacher to write! Life is too short to spend all one's time writing out "First person singular concord" a million times!

This principle is what I like to call the "Lenny" method, in honour of a teacher at Phambili High School called Lenny who had a way of seeing these things clearly. He taught Science, and one day came into the staffroom where all the English teachers were marking away, complaining about the marking load as usual. We were marking essays, giving marks for structure, spelling, etc. He took one look at this, picked up an essay, and reading it quickly, gave it a mark of 53%. "Read it and think of a number!" he said. I pooh-poohed this at the time but over the years I have come to realise that he was right! Unlike the teacher at Mmabatho High who, at a workshop, gave an essay 53% When asked to explain why, he said he always gave essays 53%

Anything which lessens marking, and gives you more time to spend talking to students is what is important. The beauty of the grid is that you can easily assess a student's writing with the student, making a cross alone allows you to talk to the student about their writing. This kind of immediate action is what is often missing when teachers spend too much time marking at home. In the end remedial action depends on what the student understands, not the teacher.