Book Review: Activities for Alternative Assessment: Monitoring learning accomplishments in the ELT Classroom by Leo Selivan

Reviewed by Stephen Tarbuck

Introduction

As a happy (and actively so!) owner of many of DELTA Publishing’s resources it was inevitable that at some point I would look to expand my burgeoning collection.

In my classes I had begun to experiment with Exit Tickets and I wanted something to guide me on exploring self-assessment further. After a quick search I found Activities for Alternative Assessment: Monitoring Learning Accomplishments in the ELT Classroom by Leo Selivan from DELTA Publishing’s Ideas in action series.

This particular book immediately got my attention because it included examples of Exit Tickets and also because it was part of the Ideas in action series, which I am a huge fan of.

I am particularly enamoured of the Ideas in action series because I find them the easiest way into a given topic, and the ready supply of photocopiable activities, most of which require little to no adaptation to work well in my classroom. I said much the same thing in my review of another Ideas in action book, Activities for Task-based Learning by Neil Anderson and Neil McCutcheon.

I bought the present volume in September 2025, and since I had made extensive use of it before Christmas rolled around, I felt a write-up was very much in order!

This book of 168 pages consists of nine chapters which are titled by the assessment topic they address, including Self-Assessment, Peer Assessment, Portfolios, Projects, and Assessing Receptive Skills.

The first chapter that precedes the more focused look at these different areas considers the theory behind monitoring learning accomplishments and gives an overview of formative and summative assessment. If you are not overly interested in teaching theory, you could skip this chapter and move straight into the more activity focused ones. However, in doing so you would miss out on the opportunity to get an accessible overview of the principles of assessment that would help anyone thinking of completing the DELTA.

The other chapters follow the same format as other books in the Ideas in action series. Basically they revolve around a set of activities that are connected by the chapter topic and include instructions for running the activity, ideas for exploiting the activity for student assessment, and a photocopiable resource.

Example Activities

This book addresses a range of assessment activities. I would like to focus on three that stood out to me.

In Chapter 5 – Projects, there is an activity called ‘Poster Presentation’. The instructions for running the activity provide a breakdown of the process for preparing a class for writing and giving a presentation.

This culminates in a photocopiable listening sheet for students that gives them a purpose for listening to the other presentations.

I tried this with a group of A2 teenagers, between the ages of 11 and 13. The idea was for the students to prepare a bag of random items in pairs and then present it ensuring use of the target language (this/that/these/those) in their presentation.

The presentations themselves went fine, with the typically variable quality of production and interaction one comes to expect from this age and level. The listening sheet that comes with the book really helped, however – usually there feels like little reason for audience members to pay attention while their peers take their turn at presenting, but the sheet really solved that issue.

There is an activity named ‘Vocabulary Checklist’ from Chapter 2 – Self-Assessment that will be very useful for teachers who haven’t come across it before. When students encounter new lexis or vocabulary they label it with one of these symbols: + ？╳ and their choice of labelling is based on their own perception of how well they feel they understand the language. This provides immediate feedback on the students’ perceived knowledge of the new language, and can be used by the students when they are revising their notes at home, or by the teacher in planning review activities.

An expansion of this idea that Selivan introduces is to label the word according to its perceived usefulness (or some other criterion) – so words could be labelled as ‘useful’, ‘interesting’, or even ‘words I don’t need.’ This feeds neatly into the idea of the personal dictionary, which is a practice I know has gained traction with a lot of EFL teachers over the years, and which brings nothing but benefits to the students that use it.

The activity provided a lot of communicative practice for my students as they tried to justify why they thought certain words were interesting or not useful, which actually did help me to see how well they understood the language.

The best example of this is from my A1+ teen group when one student felt that ‘lentils’ would be a ‘word I don’t need.’ However, we still wanted to check if they understood the word and after discussion and further definition we realised that the student’s uncle was allergic to lentils. Suddenly the student had built a personal connection to the new word, which hopefully would help them retain it.

Apart from helping the student interact with the language in a new way the activity provided a reminder for me that development as a teacher isn’t always about solidifying what we know but learning how to adapt comfortable routines, or as Gomes (2023) says, ‘[T]rying something new not only helps you as a teacher and gives you the chance to reflect, but it is also incredibly beneficial for the students’.

Chapter 3 – Peer Assessment has an activity called ‘Two Stars and A Wish’ which I used with my C1 Advanced exam teens.

Essentially the activity asks students to look at another student’s work and list two things they liked about the writing and one thing they wish the writer had included.

My students had recently completed an Essay writing task, so we tried the activity much as it was presented in the book – with the students also given a copy of the assessment criteria for the C1 Advanced exam.

It’s possible that the way I structured this task led to the slightly disappointing outcomes – the students referred to the assessment criteria as I had hoped, but their feedback was generally too shallow to be of much use. This is a useful reminder that our students are not examiners, and we should think twice before treating them as such!

Conclusion

I have enjoyed using this book and consider it a worthwhile purchase. That isn’t to say, though, that it’s perfect. I have found it necessary to adapt more of the photocopiable activities before using them than I did with most of the other resources I have come to rely on.

But is that surprising? Good resource books can either give you resources to use in a highly specific category of lesson – activities for teenagers will work well with teenagers but need adapting for adults; or they will give you template ideas that can be customised to suit your lesson because the overall topic area is simply too vast.

I think that’s the case with this book. Assessment needs to happen in all lessons and at all ages, so there can never be a one-size-fits-all approach. I don’t mind adapting when I need to – but I am glad to have Selivan’s core ideas to build from. I found many of the ideas to be a fresh way of learning for my students and if you find yourself wanting some practical ideas for how to make your students more reflective learners or some inspiration for adapting old activities then this book will be a useful starting point.