Talk less assess more

When I get into conversation with my students, it’s hard to stop to take notes or give them feedback.  I always want to let my students express themselves and then comment on their output afterward. But how much do I miss?  What should I be pushing my students to say or not say? Is there any tech that would help me correct my students more?

The topic of assessing students’ improvement came up recently in class.  We started looking at different technologies that have been designed to help teachers identify students’ progress, help them practice their weak points, and even give effective feedback.

Lee and Sauro (2021) described the various ways that instructors could approach it. From simply asking the students about their impressions of conversation either using a Likert scale or an interview. Or more detailed quantitative approaches such as evaluating the transcripts from video conferencing or having the student do pre- and post tests and comparing the differences.  These various methods can glean a lot of information from the communicative experiences, but they also take time and can be quite stressful for the participants. There must be a better option.

With the advent of LLMs integrated into video conferencing software, we can now get detailed summarized meeting minutes and full transcripts that can be analyzed for patterns.  Otter, Zoom, Google Meet all have these features implemented and are a boon for both the teacher and the L2 learner.  Reflecting on the experience, reviewing the output, puzzling out for yourself the communication issues that you faced will make these AI generated summaries a great follow-up and also a clear example of progress that they are making.  Teachers can also keep these notes to better craft lessons that will help strengthen communication weak points (Google 2026).

I see the advantages of these new technological methods, but I haven’t implemented them yet.  I have to get my students onboard, make sure that having the lesson being recorded isn’t intrusive or makes them feel self-conscious.  If I can do that, then I will definitely start relying on this tech to level up my teaching game.

Lee, J., & Sauro, S. (2021). Assessing language learning in virtual exchange: suggestions from the field of language assessment. Journal of Virtual Exchange, 4, 33–49. https://doi.org/10.21827/jve.4.36087

Google. (2026). AI note taking. Google Workspace. https://workspace.google.com/solutions/ai/ai-note-taking/