The word 'assessment' is usually used to refer to the activity of judging, commenting on and awarding a specific mark to a piece of work. As we shall see, this activity can take a wide variety of forms. There is another sense of the word, however, a broader one which denotes the monitoring of performance that a tutor is constantly involved in. This monitoring is most frequently informal, the fruit of careful listening and observation of student performance, and is used to help inform subsequent teaching decisions, either at the micro-level ('Shall I adjust the next example to reinforce this point as he/she seems uncertain about these lexical items?') or at the level of a whole class ('Tomorrow I'll move on to the next section of the book as they seemed to cope really well with this dialogue today'). Both forms of assessment are important constituents of the pedagogical process but this module will be concerned primarily with the first of them.