How do you know that your students are making progress in language learning, if you do not apply tests?

In this stage of our learning process as future English teachers I believe it is important to ask ourselves how do we recognize that our students are learning a new language? maybe it will seem that the obvious answer to this questions will be test. But as you all know and the chapter from Genesee and Upshur suggest there are several ways to recogize that (observation, portfolios, conferences, dialogue journals, interviews and questionnaires) I will like to discuss with you all when have you felt that your students have learn something and share it with us. I am sure to a certain point that you have felt it in any moment and maybe we can find something new. 

I am appealing to the fact that we all have been and still are learners and we have felt happy when we had learn something new and there is this satisfaction on our face of "I did it", so the point here it is to cath those moments and write them down. Maybe this is not the best example but the other day I was teaching the difference betwen this and that with one of my students and I was doing it with some worksheets where there were some examples with drawings some near some far, but she was not getting the idea as I had expected, so I was some how anxious and started thinking how could I explain to her. So, I took two objects from her home and left one near her and the other quite far. then I called the near one this and the farthest that and do the same with all posible objects near and far. Suddenly she got the idea and start doing the same with some jumping included. That's how I knew she had understood it.

Let's talk about speaking

In my opinion speaking is very hard to assess   since it is a productive skill you as a tester will have to be very receptive in order to see if what the learner has produce is actually what you need to get from him. I believe that, in order to make a valid test you will have to define the treats you wish to evaluate. As Brown suggest (pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar, comprehensibility, etc.) are some traits you can use to get part of the score, of course, the more you specified your goal from the speaking test the more “fair” (if could say) your grade would be, and to be specific you can create new traits.

Let's talk about testing

Hello everyone

After reading Brown for a while I found myself in front of this short quiz that you  can see in the first pages of the  reading, I hope you remenber it,  

and I must said I felt myself some how quite ignorant, because I didn't know any of the words even though the book was suggesting it was quite easy, at least that was my case, maybe you knew all the answers, I don't know. Where I want to reach is to the point of thinking the following: If I felt somehow pressed by the fact of not knowing any answer of this quiz, maybe as future teachers we could analyse how language learners feel about a test, from our own experience as students of this program, on secondary school, primary, etc., and use it to propose a better posible way to undertake tests. As for the ones who are already teachers  how do you see testing? but not as a student. How do you do it?
What are you planning to achieve when doing a test?