Obama Criticizes Republicans Over Student Loan Rates

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

President Obama spoke on Thursday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before 2,500 mostly young supporters.

By JACKIE CALMES

LAS VEGAS — After a day of fund-raisers in California, President Obama on Thursday traveled again to swing-state Nevada for the one event of his two-day Western trip that was designated as an official appearance, as opposed to a campaign stop. But it again illustrated that everything is political in an election year.

Related

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• Romney Raised More Than Obama in May (June 8, 2012)

• Republicans in Senate Block Bill on Student Loan Rates (May 9, 2012)

• Student Loan Debate Becomes Election-Year Fight (April 27, 2012)

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Mr. Obama campaigned not against Mitt Romney but against Republicans in Congress, saying they “can’t just sit on their hands” and ignore his job-creation proposals.

He emphasized the issue of keeping college loans affordable, a topic which resonates with many younger voters whose support Mr. Obama needs for reelection. And he did so at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before 2,500 mostly young supporters whose energy and chants of “four more years” gave the event the feel of a campaign rally.

According to the local newspaper, Mr. Obama’s arrival coincided with a new television ad here from his campaign that echoed the president’s message. In the ad, Mr. Obama urges Congress to pass the measures he first proposed last September, as part of his job-creation package, to help states pay for keeping teachers and first-responders at work and to finance public infrastructure projects providing jobs for construction workers.

But, he told the university crowd, “Making college affordable — that’s one of the best things we can do for the economy.”

Mr. Obama sought to spread the word that his administration is speeding a change in a 2009 law that will allow people who remain current on repaying their federal Stafford loans to have their repayments capped at 10 percent of their disposable income, down from 15 percent, so borrowers can more easily manage their debt. The change is to take effect in 2014 but the administration wants the cap effective for new loans after this year. Also, Mr. Obama promoted a new directive to his education and treasury secretaries to ease the process of applying for the repayment option.

But, he told the university crowd, “the No. 1 thing Congress should do for you is to stop interest rates on student loans from going up.”

The reference was to Mr, Obama’s fight with Congress over the interest rate on current Stafford loans. The rate, cut in half to 3.4 percent five years ago to help borrowers as the economy soured, is due to return to 6.8 percent on July 1, affecting more than 7 million student loans. While many Republicans, including Mr. Romney, say they agree that the rate should temporarily remain at the lower level, the parties disagree over how to cover the government’s one-year cost of $6 billion.

College debt has exceeded $1 trillion and surpassed total credit-card debt, elevating the issue’s political importance, especially at a time when financially strained states are raising tuitions.

Democrats have proposed to offset the cost of subsidizing the lower interest rate by closing a loophole allowing some wealthy taxpayers to avoid Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes by classifying their pay as dividends, not cash income. Republicans first called instead for eliminating a fund for preventive health services in Mr. Obama’s health insurance law — a non-starter for the White House — but recently sent the president a letter proposing several alternative financing measures.

“And what has the White House done? Nothing. The president has yet to respond,” the Senate Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, said in a speech on Thursday in advance of Mr. Obama’s arrival in Nevada. “One can only surmise that he’s delaying a solution so that he can fit in a few more campaign rallies with college students while pretending someone other than himself is delaying action.”

On Wednesday, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, and the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, called on Mr. Obama to cancel his Las Vegas speech. “With all of the great economic challenges facing our country, there is no reason to manufacture political fights where there is not policy disagreement,” they wrote to the president.

Asked about the Republicans’ complaints, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said aboard Air Force One to Nevada, “We are working with Congress to get this done and we think it will get done.”

Since April Mr. Obama has raised the interest rate issue and criticized Republicans for opposing his version at college campus events in North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa — all swing states.

Before flying to Nevada, Mr. Obama attended an outdoor breakfast fund-raiser, after two each on Thursday in San Francisco and Los Angeles. About 300 people paid at least $2,500 each to attend the event at a home in a predominantly African-American enclave on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles owned by Charles Quarles, president of the Bedford Group, a real estate development firm.

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More Young Americans Out of High School Are Also Out of Work

Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News

High school students filling out job applications.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

For this generation of young people, the future looks bleak. Only one in six is working full time. Three out of five live with their parents or other relatives. A large majority — 73 percent — think they need more education to find a successful career, but only half of those say they will definitely enroll in the next few years.

Multimedia

Out of School And No Where to Work

Graphic

Harder Times for High School Graduates

Enlarge This Image

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

The survey found that 16 percent of the classes of 2009-11 had full-time jobs. Graduates at Joplin High School in Missouri.

No, they are not the idle youth of Greece or Spain or Egypt. They are the youth of America, the world’s richest country, who do not have college degrees and aren’t getting them anytime soon.

Whatever the sob stories about recent college graduates spinning their wheels as baristas or clerks, the situation for their less-educated peers is far worse, according to a report from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University scheduled to be released on Wednesday. The data comes from a national survey of high school graduates who are not enrolled in college full time, a notoriously transient population that social scientists and other experts had been having trouble tracking. (In the two months since the survey was conducted, a large share of participants have had their phone numbers disconnected and could not be reached.)

For this group, finding work that pays a living wage and offers some sense of security has been elusive.

“I want more money, and I really don’t like what I do,” said Walter Walden, 24, of Wenatchee, Wash., one of the lucky members of this group who has a full-time job, in this case, at a restaurant. “I had to go back to school.” He now lives with his mother so he can take nursing classes part time.

Workers just a few years younger than Mr. Walden have been thrust into a daunting combination of a temporarily feeble economy and the longer-term elimination of traditional middle-class jobs.

Americans who graduated from high school just before layoffs started to swell — in this report, defined as 2006-8 — were having trouble making ends meet. Just 37 percent employed were full time and another 23 percent were working part time, usually because they could not find full-time work.

But among those who graduated after the financial crisis, the numbers are far worse: only 16 percent of the classes of 2009-11 had full-time jobs. An additional 22 percent were working part time, and most of them wanted full-time work.

Despite the continuing national conversation about whether college is worth it given the debt burden it entails, most high school graduates without college degrees said they believed they would be unable to get good jobs without more education.

“If I ever want to get out of retail,” said Bethany McClour, 21, a part-time worker at The Children’s Place clothing store in Medford, Ore., “more education is definitely important.”

Getting it is challenging, though, and not only because of formidable debt levels.

Ms. McClour and her husband, Andy, have two daughters under 3 and another due next month. She said she tried enrolling in college classes, but the workload became too stressful with such young children. Mr. McClour works at a gas station. He hates his work and wants to study phlebotomy, but the nearest school is an hour and a half away.

“My mother is my day care,” Ms. McClour said. “We can’t move that far away.”

Others surveyed said college was out of reach because of the cost or family responsibilities.

Many of these young people had been expecting to go to college since they started high school, perhaps anticipating that employers would demand skills high schools do not teach. Just one in 10 high school graduates without college degrees said they were “extremely well prepared by their high school to succeed in their job after graduation.”

These young people worried about getting left behind and were pessimistic about reaching some of the milestones that make up the American dream.

More than half — 56 percent — of high school graduates without college diplomas said that their generation would have less financial success than their parents. By contrast, just 14 percent said they expected to do better than their parents. (Another study from the Heldrich Center found that recent college graduates were similarly pessimistic about whether their generation would surpass that of their parents.)

Many young people were just struggling to keep up with their parents.

When he graduated from high school last year, Harley Sproud, 18, started working for the same construction company that employed his father. A few months later, when the company ran into financial trouble, he was let go.

“Thank God I had a buddy at Burger King who could help me out,” said Mr. Sproud, of Advance, N.C.

The frying-and-cleanup job did not exactly make full use of the skills he learned last fall in a nine-week culinary class, but it was the best opportunity he could find. He is now recovering from a car accident — which required him to move back in with his parents, both for financial and medical reasons — and is hoping to return to Burger King next month.

Like Mr. Sproud, many graduates are finding it difficult to track into their desired lines of work. Among the group of high school graduates surveyed by the Heldrich Center, just over half (56 percent) said they believed they would find a “job that leads to a career” within the “next few years.”

About the same share believed they would find work that offered health insurance within that time frame. Slightly less than half of respondents said the next few years would bring work with good job security or a job with earnings that were high “enough to lead a comfortable life.” They were similarly pessimistic about being able to start a family or buy a home.

The online survey was conducted between March 21 and April 2, and covered a nationally representative survey of 544 high school graduates from the classes of 2006-11 who did not have bachelor’s degrees. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 5 percentage points.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 6, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Young Americans Out of High School Are Also Out of Work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/business/more-young-americans-out-of-high-school-are-also-out-of-work.html?_r=1&ref=education

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Artikel

Kisah Tragis Dokter Muda Steven Wijata Yang Tewas Setelah Wisuda

Posted on September 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

Kesedihan tampak di Ruang Duka Mawar dan Dahlia, Rumah Sakit Cipto Mangunkusumo, Jakarta, Minggu (25/9/2011) pagi. Peti jenazah berwarna putih dengan kaca bening melapisi jenazah Steven Wijata. Dokter muda itu pergi selama-lamanya pada usia 23 tahun.
Warna putih pada peti Steven identik dengan profesi dokter. Kepergian Steven tidak disangka-sangka karena dia masih bersemangat mengangkat sumpah sebagai dokter bersama ratusan dokter Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Indonesia (FKUI) pada Sabtu pagi.
Sore hari, dia juga masih bertemu dan berkomunikasi dengan IM, kekasihnya. Menjelang pukul 18.00, Steven memilih untuk mengurung diri di Kamar 2410 Apartemen Salemba Residence di Jalan Salemba Tengah II, Jakarta Pusat. Kamar di lantai 24 itu adalah tempat tinggalnya selama menjalankan kuliah di FKUI sejak tahun 2006.
Siapa sangka, sekitar pukul 18.45, Steven ditemukan tidak bernyawa lagi di lantai dasar apartemen tersebut. Tidak ada yang tahu persis bagaimana saat-saat sebelum Steven mengembuskan napas terakhirnya. Dari Jakarta, Steven dibawa ke Cirebon untuk dikebumikan di kota kelahirannya.
Dokter dan pemain drum
Sejumlah kawan di kampus atau di gereja mengenal Steven sebagai sosok yang baik dan murah hati. Tidak jarang dia menjadi tempat bercerita sekaligus berkonsultasi bagi rekan-rekannya yang punya persoalan kesehatan.
Pria kelahiran 1 September 1988 ini dikenal memiliki ketertarikan tinggi di bidang kedokteran. Dua tahun silam, Steven mengikuti Kongres Internasional Ilmu Kedokteran di University Medical Center Groningen di Belanda untuk mempresentasikan hasil penelitiannya mengenai alat pendeteksi dini penyakit kanker.
Seperti ditulis dalam situs Tempo Online edisi 25 Mei 2009, Steven mengkreasikan sinar berdaya rendah dari spektroskop untuk membedakan antara sel normal dan sel kanker. Alat ini setidaknya mendeteksi awal pertumbuhan kanker sebelum penderita meneruskan ke pemeriksaan lanjutan.
Tidak hanya piawai di dunia kedokteran, Steven juga mahir menggebuk drum. Bersama sejumlah rekannya, Steven tergabung dalam grup band Made by Med. Keterampilan di dunia musik juga membuat Steven bergabung dalam kelompok musik di gereja.
Kejadian kemarin mengejutkan semua pihak. Polisi juga belum bisa memastikan penyebab Steven jatuh dari lantai 24 itu.
”Kami masih menunggu hasil visum dokter untuk mengetahui apakah ada penganiayaan atau zat berbahaya di dalam tubuhnya,” kata Kepala Polsek Senen Komisaris Iman Zebua.
Sejauh temuan polisi di lokasi kejadian, tidak ada bekas alkohol atau narkoba di dalam kamar. Korban juga sendirian di dalam unit itu saat kejadian serta kondisi kamar yang terkunci dari dalam. Polisi juga masih mengusahakan untuk mendapatkan rekaman kamera pengintai di apartemen itu untuk pengembangan penyelidikan.
Entah apa yang terjadi pada dokter genius ini, tetapi semua kerabat dan kawan mengiringi kepergiannya dengan doa. Steven Wijata (23) yang meninggal di Apartemen Salemba Residence, mengatakan sedang lelah, sesaat sebelum ditemukan tidak bernyawa di lantai dasar apartemen.
Pernyataan itu disampaikan Steven kepada IM, pacarnya sesaat sebelum kejadian. Informasi itu disampaikan lewat Blackberry Messenger.
Penghuni kamar 2410 itu diduga jatuh dari lantai 24. Saat ditemukan tempurung kepala pecah, usus terurai, dan tulang-tulang kaki patah.
Steven Wijata (23) ditemukan meninggal di tower A Apartemen Salemba Indah, Sabtu (24/9/2011) malam. Dugaan sementara, Steven jatuh dari lantai 24.
Pada Sabtu pagi, Steven baru saja diwisuda sebagai dokter dari Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Indonesia.
Belum diketahui apa yang menyebabkan Steven jatuh dari apartemen itu. Jenazah dibawa ke RS Cipto Mangunkusumo untuk divisum dan disemayamkan di rumah duka setempat.
Pada Minggu pagi ini jenazah dibawa ke Cirebon, Jawa Barat, untuk dikebumikan di kota kelahirannya itu.

http://akuindonesiana.wordpress.com/category/pendidikan/

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kinds of sentences

                                      KINDS OF SENTENCES  

A sentence is a group of words that consists of two main parts (i.e. subject and predicate); in addition, they should be grammatically and logically arranged. Every sentence must have a subject and a verb/predicate. A sentence may be a statement, question, command, request, or exclamation. The first letter must be capitalized, and the sentence must be ended with a final punctuation mark in the form of a period (.); a question mark (?); or an exclamation point (!).

Sentence can be classified into four categories according to the number and types of clauses that are in them. They are simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence and compound-complex sentence.

1.      Simple Sentence

Simple sentence consists of a subject and a predicate or an independent clause. Only independent clause can stand by itself to form simple sentence.

·        I enjoy studying English in my own library every weekend.

·        My friends always try to finish our task and duty as soon as possible.

·        John asked the questions and answered it in the same breath.

2.      Compound Sentence

Compound sentence consists of two or more independent clauses joined together in any one of the following three ways.

a.      By a coordinating conjunction (and, or, nor, for, so, yet, but, etc)

I enjoy studying English, but I hate studying math.

b.      By a sentence connector (furthermore, however, therefore, etc)

I enjoy studying English; however, I hate studying math.

c.      By a semicolon (;)

I enjoy studying English; I hate studying math.

3.      Complex Sentence

Complex sentence is the combination of an independent clause and at least one dependent clause. The independent clause expresses the main idea while the dependent clause expresses subordinate idea. Subordinator such as when, while, where, who, because, as, if, even though, so that, etc

·        Although I enjoy studying English, I hate math.

·        I hate math although I enjoy studying English.

·        As he loved his sister, he bought her computer, even though he could hardly afford it.

4.      Compound-Complex Sentence

Compound-complex sentence is a combination of two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.

·        I hate math, but I enjoy studying English even though I am not very good at it.

·        I like you when you are cheerful but I hate you when you are grumpy.

·        Many people know that smoking is bad but they cannot stop smoking.

·        I enjoy studying English when I was teenager but I am not very good at it.   

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Clausa

CLAUSE

A clause is a group of words which forms a grammatical unit and has a subject and a predicate. There are two kinds of clauses: independent (main) and dependent (subordinate) clause.

v Independent clause is a group of words that has a subject and a predicate. It is used as a part of a sentence but it is grammatically independent and could therefore stand alone.

Subject + Verb + Complement

-         She enjoys studying English.

-         She enjoys studying English in her room with her friends.

v Dependent clause is introduced with a subordinator such as when, while, if, before, etc and it is followed by a subject, verb, and complement. It cannot stand alone because the subordinator signals the need for an independent clause to complete the meaning of the sentence.

Subordinator + Subject + Verb + Complement

-         When she was young, ………………

-         The lion, which was big and fierce, roared loudly.

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ASSESSMENT OF LANGUAGE SKILLS

I. INTRODUCTION
Assessment tests are simple and practical tests or evaluations that help to determine the skills, aptitude, and general abilities of an individual or student. There are a number of different settings in which an assessment test is utilized, ranging from grade school testing to assessments that have to do with job placement and even government benefits. 
In teaching and learning process, we usually face some kinds of tests such as written test, oral test, and many others. The students may feel unhappy and afraid of getting those kinds of tests. Before we judge the tests with our bad thought, we have to know what is the meaning and the functions of the tests in teaching and learning proses. Test is a method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, and performance. The test also has the instruments. The first instrument is method because if we want to test someone, the method which we use must be explicit and structured. The second, a test must measure about the ability of a person in general and also measures their individual ability, knowledge, and performance. The results of measurements a person’s ability can show many variations. The most important thing is the tester must know and understand who the test-takers are by knowing their experience and background.
The test may measures performance, but the results shows the abilities of the test-takers. Most of the language tests are measure all of the language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A well good test is an instrument which is providing an accurate measure of the test-taker’s ability. Well in this opportunity we will talk more about assessment. There are kinds of assessments such as knowledge assessment, ability assessment, interest assessment and personality assessment. Beside there are also the types of assessment such as formative assessment, summative assessment and proses assessment. 


1.1 Kinds of Assessment
 1.1.1 Knowledge assessments
Knowledge Assessment is test the knowledge of an individual content in areas as supervision, accounting, electronics, and hydraulic systems. There are specialized tests for these, some developed by trade associations, some by commercial testing companies.
1.1.2 Ability assessment 
Ability Assessment is measure an individual's ability to perform some mental or physical task. Typing tests and computer literacy tests are an example of this kind of assessment, as are verbal and quantitative tests. Some of the exercises in assessment center arrangements are also examples of ability assessments.
1.1.3 Interest assessment
Interest assessment is measure an individual propensity for certain occupations or careers. The Strong Inventory is the best known and most rigorous assessment of this sort. We have used the Jackson Vocational Inventory to assist an Associate in career planning.
1.1.4 Personality assessment
Personality assessment is measure habits of thinking and valuing. They do this by asking the individual to describe themselves, by having them project their thoughts onto an ambiguous stimulus such as an ink spot, or by asking them to recount elements of their past.
Some psychological tests used by companies also assess signs of psychosis, neurosis, and other elements of mental illness.. These have held up in court only when the job clearly is one for which high emotional and psychic strength is a defined requirement, such as with police or fire-fighters. There have been numerous suits related to invasion of privacy issues surrounding psychological testing. These include inquiry into past experiences and behavior, especially but not limited to sexual experiences and drug and alcohol use.


1.2 Types of Assessment 
1.2.1 Formative Assessment
Formative assessment implies that the results will be used in the formation and revision process of an educational effort.  Formative assessments are used in the improvement of educational programs. This type of assessment is the most common form of assessment in higher education, and it constitutes a large proportion of TLL’s assessment work. Since educators are continuously looking for ways to strengthen their educational efforts, this type of constructive feedback is valuable.


1.2.2 Summative Assessment
Summative assessment is used for the purpose of documenting outcomes and judging value.  It is used for providing feedback to instructors about the quality of a subject or program, reporting to stakeholders and granting agencies, producing reports for accreditation, and marketing the attributes of a subject or program. Most studies of this type are rarely exclusively summative in practice, and they usually contain some aspects of formative assessment. 
1.2.3 Proses Assessment
Process assessment begins with the identification of project milestones to be reached, activities to be undertaken, products to be delivered, and/or projected costs likely to be incurred in the course of attaining a project’s final goals. The process assessment determines whether markers have been reached on schedule, deliverables produced, and cost estimates met. The degree of difference from the expected plan is used to evaluate success.


II. HOW TO ASSESS LISTENING, SPEAKING, READING AND WRITING SKILLS


2.1 How to Assess Listening Skill
All language users perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When you decide to assess someone’s ability in one or the four language skills, you should observe their performance and then you assess their competence. And now we will talk about how to assess listening skill. In assessing listening skills, the tests are not about listen or hear something but also speak something. Both skills are related. How can you speak without listening? In addition, you should pay attention in your listening ability to manage your ability on the others language skills. 
In assessing listening skills, there are 17 different objectives such as:
Micro skills:
1. Discriminate among the different sounds of English.
2. Receive chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic,  structure, intonations, and their role in signaling information. 
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.
10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.


Macro skills
12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterance, according to situations, participants, goals.
13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real world knowledge.
14. Find the relation between events, find the main ideas and supporting ideas, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
16. Use body language and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting keywords, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension.


There are four types of listening performance such as :
1. Intensive. The components of listening with a larger stretch of language. A form of this performance is the assessment of recognizing phonological and morphological elements of language.
2. Responsive. The components of listening with a short stretch language. 
3. Selective. The purpose of this performance is to look for a general meanings and the teachers also could ask the students for example asking their names and other questions.
4. Extensive. Listening for the main idea and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.

2.2 How to Assess Speaking Skill
If we look at language performance, listening and speaking are related. We can assess oral language only in limited contexts of speaking (monologues, speeches, or telling a story and reading aloud). Speaking is a productive skills and if we want to be good in speaking we should be good in listening too. That’s why both of them are related skills. There are five basic types of speaking such as :
1. Imitative. This type of speaking performance is the ability to imitate a word, phrase, or a sentence.
2. Intensive. The second type of speaking is the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence. The speaker must be aware of semantic properties in order to be able to respond something. 
3. Responsive. This type of speaking includes interaction and test comprehension.
4. Interactive. The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is in the length and the complexity of the interaction. 
5. Extensive. This type of speaking includes speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling. 


There are 16 different objectives to assess in speaking such as :
Micro skills
1. Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants.
2. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
3. Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units to accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery
7. Use various strategic device to enhance the clarity of the message.
8. Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Produce speech in natural constituents
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
11. Use a cohesive devices in speaking discourse.
          Macro skills
12. Accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
13. Use a good styles, registers, and other sociolinguistics features in face to face conversations.
14. Find the connection between events and communicate relations about focal and peripheral ideas, events and feeling, new information, generalization and exemplification.
15. Find the features, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
16. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies such as emphasizing keywords, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words and appealing for help.


2.3 How to Assess Reading Skill
In learning foreign language, reading is a basic skill which the teachers expect learners to acquire. Reading is the most essential skill for success in all educational contexts, it will help us when we create assessments of general language ability. The assessment of reading ability does not end with the measurement of comprehension. The strategy of understanding is the important factors to include in assessing learners. 
There are three types or genres of reading such as :
1. Academic Reading
Examples: General interest articles (in magazines, newspapers, etc.), technical reports (lab reports), professional journal articles, reference material (dictionaries), textbooks, theses, essays, papers, test directions, editorials and opinion writing


2. Job-related Reading
Examples: Messages, letters/emails, memos, reports, schedules, signs, announcements, forms, applications, questionnaires, financial documents, directories, manuals, directions


3. Personal Reading
Examples: Newspapers and magazines, letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations, messages, notes, lists, schedules, recipes, menus, maps, calendars, advertisements, novels, short stories, jokes, drama, poetry, financial documents, forms, questionnaires, medical reports, immigration documents, comic strips, cartoons
When we realize that the list above is only the beginning, it is to see how overwhelming to read in foreign language. The genre of a text can makes the readers feel easy to describe the contains of the text. For example if the readers know that the text about recipe, they will expect the information and ingredients from the text. The readers also have to know what is the purpose in reading a text and what strategies will we use to find the information and the main idea from the text.      


There are 14 different objectives in assessing reading ability such as ;
Micro skills
1. Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2. Save chunks of language of different lengths in a short-term memory.
3. Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
4. Recognize a core of words and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
5. Recognize grammatical word classes, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
6. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
7. Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses.


Macro skills
8. Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.
9. Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose.
10. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
11. Describe events and ideas, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
12. Distinguish between literal ang implied meanings.
13. Detect culturally specific references
14. Develop and use a battery of reading strategies, such a scanning, skimming, guessing the meaning of words from context
There are also some principal strategies for reading comprehension such as :
1. Identify your purpose in reading text.
2. Apply spelling rules and conventions for bottom-up decoding
3. Use lexical analysis to determine the meaning.
4. Guess the meaning of words, idioms, etc. when you are not certain.
5. Skim to the text for the main ideas.
6. Scan the text for specific information 
7. Use silent reading techniques for rapid processing.
8. Use marginal notes, outlines, and charts to retain the information.
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships.

2.4 How to Assess Writing Skill
Writing skills is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life. Writing has it unique side as a skill with its own features and conventions. We also know the difficulties of writing ability even though in our native language. In assessing student’s ability, you need to decide your objective or criterion. Writing also has their types of writing performances such as :
1. Imitative. This type of speaking ability includes the ability how to spell correctly. It is a level when the learners are trying to manage the mechanics of writing.
2. Intensive. This type of speaking is concerning about the importance of the meaning and the content of the text.
3. Responsive. This type is concerning about assessments tasks that require learners to perform at a limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph and creating a logically connected sentence.
4. Extensive. Extensive writing implies successful management of all the processes and strategies of writing for all purposes and this type is focusing on grammatical form is limited occasional editing or proofreading of a draft.


There are 12 different objectives in assessing writing skills such as :
Micro skills
1. Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2. Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
3. Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns.
4. Use acceptable grammatical systems, patterns, and rules.
5. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
6. Use cohesive devices in written discourse.


Macro skills
7. Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse.
8. Appropriately accomplish the communicative functions of written texts according to form and purpose.
9. Find the links and connections between events and communicate the relations of the main ideas.
10. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.
11. Correctly find the specific references in the context of the written text.
12. Develop and use a battery of writing strategies such as assessing the audience’s interpretations, using prewriting devices, using paraphrases and synonyms, and using feedback for revising and editing.


III. CONCLUSION
The assessment is an activity in teaching learning process when the teacher monitoring and judging the student’s performance in classroom activities. With this paper we can know how to assess the four kinds of language skills very clearly and how important the assessment I teaching and learning proses. We should use all the strategies and the method above to assess our student’s ability in listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill, and writing skill. We can also use the tools or devices to assess our students in our classroom activities. Bring the important and useful tools or devices to our classroom and then you can teach the students easily by sing those devices.

IV. REFERENCES
Brown, H. Douglas.2003.Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. San Francisco State University.
Buck, Gary.2001.Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.    
 

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