When teachers are involved in the assessment development process, we can benefit by understanding all of its phases. This is of value for most of the times, we are involved in one or more of these phases as part of our activities.These phases are planning, development, administration, analysis, feedback, and reflection.We have to consider that "assessment is an integral part of the entire curriculum cycle,"
Planning
As we start planning, we must consider why we are assessing what type of assessment fits our needs. At this point, the target language use domain, TLU, which is delineated as the tasks that the test taker is likely to encounter outside of the test itself, and to which we want our inferences about language ability to generalize (Bachman and Palmer), is consideredin the initial stages of our planning to choose assessment tasks that reflect TLU domains, be these real-life domains or language instruction domains. We also have to decide the best means of assessment for our objectives, envisioning the skills we want to asses, the time and resources, seeing what realistic options we have in our situation.
