Interviews as an useful tool for producing washback in assessment

Interviews in assessment can be applied in different stages of a teaching process; at the beginning a teacher could implement an interview in order to gather information about students` social, personal and cultural background, and in the same way previous language and educational experiences and also their current language skills or English proficiency. Some needs could also be detected at this stage. During the process information about the effectiveness of a unit or some procedures can be gathered and also some students` impressions about the course can be checked. The data collected at the end of a course can be useful in the way that revision of instructional plans for next  groups of students can be made. I do recommend that a short and an

informal interview should be made at the moment of giving back the tests scores; It could create beneficial washback in the case of low scores because the students are not going to take only their bad results to home, instead they can be encouraged by the teacher to keep trying and get a more possitive feeling about their failure. It can also help to incrase the motivation of students with high scores due to good comments of the teacher about the high scores.