Assessment suffers from a Heisenbergian conundrum: the very act of assessing a students’ language production often distorts the language being assessed. In some cases, learners produce target-like forms only when being explicitly assessed, and assessed outcomes are not well correlated with outcomes found outside of overt assessment This talk will explore research from adjacent fields that suggests that overt assessment may be self-defeating.

In this exploratory overview, strategies for covert assessment will be discussed, and participants will be asked to play at crafting informal assessments which do not, at first glance, seem to be assessments at all.