Using the video to promote peer and self - assessment in the English Class

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the results of using the video to promote peer and self – assessment in the first two oral English courses at University of Costa Rica, Paraiso Campus, Bachelor in English Teaching. In 2017 and 2018 students recorded three videos for each course in which they talked about some of the topics that were suggested by the instructor and were closely related to the course contents. In class, as group work, they used a guideline prepared by the instructor to review their peers’ videos. They focused on the presenter’s delivery, grammar, and pronunciation as well as in the content of the recording. During the peer evaluation activity, learners received written as well as oral responses from their partners. In the self – evaluation stage of the activity, they answered a questionnaire in which they indicated the number of times they recorded their videos before handing them to the instructor as well as their perception of their own performance as well as what they considered they needed to improve about it. The idea behind asking them to write the number of times they had to record the video was to know if they had self – evaluated. The fourth video in each course asked pupils to value how their language competence had evolved, during the first semester and during the whole year respectively. Results show that incorporating the video in the language class was an effective strategy to promote peer and self-assessment.