ABSTRACT
A good assessment plan includes both formative and summative assessment. One needs both formative and summative assessments for vocabulary that consider a student's vocabulary growth and the student's ability to use strategies to confront unfamiliar words. Assessment for vocabulary is certainly not a matter of giving a multiple choice or matching test for a word list. Good vocabulary detectives look around the word for context clues, and their search is not limited to the sentence in which the word appears: they use clues from all of the surrounding sentences. Because receptive control means that students have some feel for the meaning of the words, a test of receptive knowledge should not require students to use the words in sentences or to decide whether or not various usages are correct. At the other end of the spectrum lie tests that require productive control. The ultimate test of productive control is to use words in meaningful sentences.
