One of the most useful and instructive things we can do as language tutors is occasionally to stop and ask ourselves: Why am I getting students to do this? What is the purpose of this assessment? Two more specific formulations of these questions are:

• Am I using it to measure the stage students have reached on their way to achieving the particular course outcome, that is: am I more concerned with the product?
• Or am I using it to help students improve their performance in the language, that is: am I more concerned with the process?

These two purposes are usually called summative and formative assessment respectively.

In formative assessment, what matters is the dialogue between tutor and student: the amount, quality and appropriateness of feedback and students' response to it are more important than the marks awarded. Summative assessment, on the other hand, is an overall judgement of attainment at a particular moment, a clear and supposedly definitive statement of performance rather than a contribution to the teaching and learning process. This neat distinction does not always work in practice as the two types of assessment can often overlap, especially if feedback is given on an assessed class test or marks are awarded for all the work set on a module. (For a readable summary of the key differences between formative and summative procedures in a generic rather than languages-specific context, see Knight, 2001: 3-10.)

Ask any tutor and they will tell you that ideally they would like their assessment to serve more the interests of formative than summative assessment. However, they will also quickly add that the latter is an essential requirement of our educational system, indeed of our society, that constructive feedback and encouragement are inevitably accompanied by marks, exams, credits and certificates. One can argue about whether summative assessment is the most effective form (it is almost certainly not), but society demands it and (depressingly, in the eyes of some) students see it as the main purpose of assessment (see section 13.1.2); tutors therefore must employ it.

That does not mean we should not be trying to educate students about assessment, as well as about our disciplines. Indeed it is our duty to show students the importance of assessment in their studies as whole, not just as an exit token or stamp. We need to demonstrate that assessment and feedback are central to making progress in a language, that they help prepare the way for further effective learning and progression, and that they underpin motivation, which research has clearly shown is the key factor in learning, in particular learning a language.

And, of course, assessment also brings rewards. However much the purist in us values formative assessment, our pragmatic side must acknowledge that students are motivated by the prospect of success and certification, and that we would be foolish not to harness this motivation as much as we can: the reality is, if you tell students they will be assessed on something, they are likely to spend more time learning, digesting and assimilating it than would otherwise be the case.

In summary, assessment is inevitably both formative and summative. There is nothing wrong with the fact that assessment drives learning provided it does not merely become a means of sorting the 'wheat from the chaff' and that we do not just test students for the sake of it. The key is to start from what one wants students to learn, the outcomes, and to devise forms of assessment that help them to realize those outcomes.