Can I implement testing and informal assessment in my teaching context?

I think that the most difficult part of being a teacher is when the moment of giving grades comes. I really hate that part because nowadays the most of the students wants to get the highest grade for nothing and it doesn´t fit in my mind, But also there are some students that always show their interest and commitment with the subject, but for them it's very difficul to get high grades if we as teachers only use the traditional ways of assessment. For that reason, I always combine both ways and I help those students who really deserve it.

Developing communicative competence

As english teacher I have always wondered about the best way or method to help my students to develop communicative competence, but for sure there are no magic wands to get it. The best thing that we can do is to provide the motivation to learn.
In colombia and many other countries around the world it is vey common to find "english teachers" that still continue using the old method of grammar translation, maybe they haven not realised that there are more effective ways of teaching. We have to place our students in a real life situation in order to make them express their ideas and opinions about what is significant. I think that we must bring to our classrooms different contents, also open debates about interesting topics which make them feel confident to speak about. We can not say that teaching language structures is not important,but it is something that we can teach while we develop a class project, or any other activity focused on communicative competence, like plays, oral presentations, videos, essays, etc (speaking and writing skills)

In a nutshell

Nowadays a lot of people express their desire of learning english, and they recognise its importance, but just a few of them make the decision of starting their learning process; others still are expecting to find someone with a magic wand to make them speak as natives.
Learning a language is a process that never ends and demands time if we really want to reach an acceptable level.
In my own opinion english is a great language because you can travel to any country and always you will find someone who understands you.

Learning chinese has become today's boom and I could say that it will never remove english from the position of being the most spoken language in the world. it means that there's no reason to be worried about., we will have job for so many years more (I hope so)