Creating Effective Assessments

While reading Chapter 24 in HDB I was reminded of both some of tests that I have taken through my life and of some tests that I have seen others take or that I have administered. Throughout all of those tests it seemed that Face Validity was one of the most important aspects because it either made the students confident in the assessment or it made them laugh it off, even if it was an effective assessment. A good example of an assessment that had no face validity was one that my instructor in my obeservation class had administered. One of the questions that was on this test (a test of multiple writing skills) was something like, "List 3 reasons why an Elephant does not make for a good pet". Most of the test was short answer like this and since the students were not told explicitly what this was assessing they didn't take it seriously or understand it. Now to give this particular question some credit, the instructor had used this example to teach a lesson one day and the analogy made sense at the time. Although by the time the midterm test came almost everyone had forgotten about how he had used this analogy for 10 min. of a 2 hour lesson over a moth ago. The problem here was simply a lack of purpose/clarity, face validity, authentic tasks, and possibly some perceived Washback. Interestingly enough, many of these simple problems (3/4) were addressed in HDB Ch. 24 under how to turn" existing tests into more effective procedures". Now my observation class' instructor might have to restructure much of his test tasks in order to fulfill these seemingly simple issues, but in the end his test would be much more effective and useful for semesters to come.

To address Washback quickly (which reminds me of the negative term "back-wash", i.e. when someone's saliva goes into their drink, but since this is the opposite of our term we can consider Washback as possitive) I just want to mention the grading of our Video Analysis Assigment. I think that the feedback we got (or at least that I did) was very helpful for our Washback, since I will be able to use those comments the next time I teach. If the only thing we had gotten back was the rubric with the different grades then I would've only been able to speculate about how I did; usually my mind goes to the negative when being graded. Since the comments that I got were relevent and helped me to think of things that I hadn't thought of before, I felt that our assessment was much more useful and practical.

Archaic language and speaking activities for children

One of the things that caught my interest in this week's reading was the chapter on 'Developing Children's Listening and Speaking in ESL'. Before I read the chapter I didn't think I would be interested in it, but I ended up connecting with it because I did many of these same activities when I was in pre-school and kindergarten. I am not sure if many of the activities I did were intended to improve our listening or speaking, but I assume this is what some of them were meant for (also for memory as well). 

An example of one of these activities was the Haunted House listening activity I did in pre-school. The gist of this activity was that our teacher would play a record (yes an actual one) that told a story and we were to act out what was going on in the story as we listened to it. She had a collection of these records, but in the Haunted House one we would start by stomping our feet in place as we walked, then if the narrator said we went under/over/around/or through something we would act it out. As the story progressed we made it under branches, over walls, around ponds, and through vines until we made it to Dracula's lair. As soon as this happened we would then run as fast as we could back the way we came doing the exact same under/over/around/or through motions in order to get back to safety. All of this was done in place and after we had become familiar with one of the records (these were done maybe a couple times a week) we would then sing along with the directions that the narrator would give. This is somewhat similar to the HOT DOG song on pg. 142 in MCM. I think that activities like this are useful because not only are they memorable, but students often see them just as something fun to do instead of as boring drill exercises.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the idea of using songs and stories with archaic language in them (MCM 143). I thought that the author made a good point when they said that the students understand that this language isn't usually used in English and so they don't adopt it in their speech. I agree, if we did change some of the language in these songs and stories I think that we wouldn't be allowing our ESL students to engage with the same cultural materials that many native-speaking children use. This won't hurt their language abilities, but they may miss out on some important cultural information.

A note about Feb. 23rd

At the beginning of class last week Kizuna and I gave our presentation on Oral Language Development. I think that the discussion portion of our presentation (which followed Kizuna's introduction on speaking difficulties for non-native English speakers) went better than planned. We didn't cover all of our discussion questions, but I think that the class came up with some very good points about speaking that I hadn't anticipated (i.e. body language and outside factors that affect our speech or willingness to produce it). The discussion went so well that Kizuna and I were unaware that our time was almost up and so we had to cram in our last activity. This definitely had an effect on how we gave our instructions and how the class perceived/understood the activity, but even so I think that the activity wasn't a total loss because it got the class to discuss some important ideas about how people communicate from more than one point of view.

After that we went to the GLL. Since many of our computers weren't working properly we ended up doing two activities. One was an assessment of two ESL students from a video and the other activity was to create activities for our students using props and games from the library's teaching section. I think that it was interesting to see how each of the lessons had to be changed last week because challenges like this often come up in classrooms and we have to be prepared to adjust our lessons and even throw out some of our planned activities.

Speak up or else!

I'm not up to creating awesome titles at the moment, but hopefully it gets the job done in a moderately boring way instead of in an extremely boring way (kind of like the Oscars). Anyways, this week we read about the subject of speaking, which is one of the central focus points in language learning. Both of our texts came from similar yet different points of view and I think that they were able to provide a lot of useful theoretical information as well as plenty of possible activity options.

As Kizuna and I prepare for our presentation tonight we mainly focused on the discussion and conversation activities because they fit both the advanced/proficient speaking level of our class and these activities will hopefully allow us to explore our role as teachers more effectively than say a role play in complaining might. I think our class already has that speaking situation covered... just kidding. I don't think that, I know it! I do think that ideas such as role plays and speeches would be very effective and appropriate speaking activities in an ESL/EFL class though. Speeches may be particularly useful for a class such as business English, since many students in that field might have to refine the art of a speech in their 2nd language in order to speak to a foreign company. We might also think that role plays should be used with younger learners since this might engage their interests more, but I think that most of these activities (even many in the P & B readings) can be adjusted and used in virtually every ESL/EFL setting. For instance a beginning student's ability to give an effective speech may be limited, but it would provide them with a new, even if uncomfortable, way of speaking. Likewise, the role play could be an extremely useful tool for my example of a business English class because they could then project their future goals and situations onto their current classroom experience and this would help to prepare them for a real-life situation. The only thing that I wish these reading would have covered a little more are speaking strategies. We will be discussing some of them in class tonight because I think that many of these strategies are important for our future students to know since they will help to increase their speaking ability.

A note about Feb. 16th

I felt like this class period was probably the most productive for me over the course of this semester so far. We got a good presentation from Thea and Stephanie, got some valuable insight from Solen, looked at some interesting cultural material from Malaysia, and we were able to sufficiently prepare for our portfolio assignment that will be due next week.

Out of all of those activities I want to mention what I found to be the most interesting part of Solen's presentation. He informed us that his ESL 202 students were very uninterested in being in his class for various reasons and then he gave some advice about how he bypassed his students' lack of motivation. I think that many of his techniques may have been very practical, but I think that they would be very effective. He even told us the differences in his approach from his first ESL class to this one. I experienced an unmotivated student last semester when I was tutoring for pronunciation and I think that when we are able to show our students their true need for further language development then they usually become more internally motivated and engaged, which are just a couple of the essential ingredients for L2 success.

Shhh, listen

This week our readings were focused on the aspect of second language learning that is largely forgotten and/or ignored at times, listening. I agree with our texts that this aspect of language learning should play a more significant role than it already does when one tries to learn a language. From my L2 experiences I know that the very first thing that many people teach in language classes is speaking. In my first German class we started by simply learning to speak the ABC's, but at the time I was unaware of how detrimental this would be to the acquisition of my L2. The reason why it turned out to be harmful for me was because my teacher did not allow us to hear a correct pronunciation of the German alphabet, instead she simply had a choral instruction planned that day. This lead to my mispronunciation of the language and so when I ended up going on a 2 week trip to Germany a few years later no one could understand me. It is interesting to note that I could understand most of the native Germans while I was there. 

Probably the second biggest consequence of my first year of learning German was that since I wasn't given the chance to listen to the language I then didn't acquire many of the grammatical forms. These forms were taught explicitly many times, but I never got the chance to internalize them and I think that if I could have listened to the language from day 1 then I might have picked up on the language much sooner (it took me about 3 years to learn the basics that I missed in my first year and in that time I missed much of the advanced material because my language base was weak).

Because of this experience I believe that the listening aspect of language learning should not be taken lightly, even if poor instruction is able to be overcome by the student eventually. I thought our readings this week did a good job of conveying this importance and they provided a lot of useful tools and ideas to get teachers started with meaningful listening activities. I think that as teachers if we are unable to provide our students with authentic listening situations (i.e. in EFL situations this may be difficult) then it is our duty to find good materials for our students. Now that we have the internet in most developed countries we can allow our students to seek out what they are interested in listening to and at the same time they can learn a lot about a language. Another useful media is television/movies, although when we use these for listening activities we should give our recommendations since not every program, film, or internet video/news cast will have useful and authentic language.

A note about Feb. 9th (vocab)

Last week we started our class with a presentation by Stephanie and Rachel. Their main activity for us was to try and write the definition of an unknown word by using the sentence context and by using its spelling (no matter how complicated). Surprisingly as a class we figured out most of the words and individually we might have gotten about 50% correct on average. Some of the wrong answers may have been due to over thinking and others may have been due to not enough context. I thought the hedgehog one was interesting because I had a porcupine in mind while reading the sentences (which is somewhat similar), but I assumed that since that image was already created by the other words that the unknown word had to be something else (over thought it).

The other part of the class that I enjoyed was Diana's presentation of her vocabulary research. Since vocabulary is such an important thing to teach our students I think that it's necessary to know what kind of research is being done on it and how this can help us to teach it more effectively. On a side note I just want to mention the activity we did in the library computer lab. I thought it was linked well to our readings (and interesting), but it felt like it wasn't a very structured activity. This may have been done intentionally but I know that many of the students in the class weren't clear about what we were doing and I think this was reflected by how uninteresting our D2L postings of our findings were.