Monthly Archives: December 2015

4 Suggestions for Assessing Interpersonal Communication with Novice Learners

600px-Two-people-talking-logoAs I’ve evolved in my teaching practice, I’ve made significant changes to how I assess oral communication. Here are a few suggestions that have helped me improve my assessment of my Novice students’ interpersonal communication, resulting in increased proficiency among these early language learners.

Suggestion #1: Just do it! It seems that many of my colleagues are hesitant to assess their Novice students’ interpersonal communication. It is their belief that that because these students are entirely dependent on memorized language, no true interpersonal communication can occur.  Fortunately, we’ve agreed to disagree on this point! In my opinion, a Novice speaker’s reliance on practiced or memorized language does not preclude her from true communication on an unrehearsed task.  While the topics that these learners discuss will be limited to those which have been practiced, they will still be able to demonstrate interpersonal communication when given an appropriate communicative task.  In fact, the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements list the following for Novice Mid Interpersonal Communication:

  • I can greet and leave people in a polite way.
  • I can introduce myself and others.
  • I can answer a variety of simple questions.
  • I can make some simple statements in a conversation
  • I can ask some simple questions
  • I can communicate basic information about myself and people I know
  • I can communicate basic information about my everyday life

Clearly we can expect students to be able to demonstrate an ability to communicate about such basic topics as likes/dislikes, leisure activities, family members, school subjects and supplies, eating habits, etc. While appropriate questions, answers, and rejoinders may be practiced in advance with Novice learners, we can ensure that they are demonstrating actual communication in this mode by creating prompts that prevent memorization of a script.  For example, by pairing a student with a classmate with whom he hasn’t yet practiced, we ensure that he is unable to memorize the exact questions he will ask and the answers or rejoinders that he will give.  Consider a unit on likes and dislikes, often one of the first topics in a Level 1 curriculum. We might give an assessment prompt such as, “You are choosing a roommate for choir camp and you want to make sure you end up with someone that likes the same things you do. Discuss your likes and dislikes in order to find out what you have in common.”  While these students will have practiced expressing their preferences (“I like…”) , asking questions (“Do you like…?), and replying to a partner (“Me, too.” “Not me.” “Me neither.”), they will not know in advance which questions they will be asked or which responses their partner will provide.  As a result, each student must be prepared to ask a variety of questions, in order to avoid repeating those asked by his partner. Likewise, working with a new partner will require a student to comprehend his interlocutor’s response (rather than simply memorizing a script) in order to choose the appropriate rejoinder. (“Me neither” is not an appropriate response to a partner who has stated that she likes something, for example.) Furthermore, even Novice learners can make some adjustments in order to clarify meaning for an interlocutor who has demonstrated a lack of comprehension.  Requests for repetition are often all that’s needed in order to understand a message, whether because the original speaker is able to correct an error that impeded comprehension or because the repetition enable the interlocutor to establish additional meaning. Clearly, even a task as simple as this one does require the negotiation of meaning which typifies interpersonal communication.

Suggestion #2:  Stay out of it! I rely almost entirely on student-to-student interaction for my interpersonal assessments, even for Novice learners, for the following reasons:

  1. In my experience, allowing students talk to each other great increases the quality of the interaction. I have followed the suggestion of Colleen Lee (@CoLeeSensei) who said in a #langchat discussion, “I teach my [students] that your partner not understanding you is YOUR responsibility to clear up!” Nothing is more magical than hearing a level 1 student encourage a classmate by suggesting possible language chunks that would provide the necessary clarification to allow communication to occur. In an early unit this year, for example, one student negotiated meaning by asking C’est ta mère ou ta sœur? when her partner used the incorrect vocabulary word when describing his family photos. This clarification gave valuable feedback to the speaker who had made the error, as well as allowed his interlocutor to stretch beyond the rehearsed statements and questions she had anticipated using during this assessment. As a result of this negotiation, both students are likely to make progress toward proficiency that wouldn’t have been likely had the conversation occurred between a teacher and student.
  2. I have found that being able to talk to a peer, rather than the teacher, greatly reduces the students’ affective filter. A conversation between a teacher and student, regardless of the prompt, is a conversation between an expert/evaluator and a student, which creates a certain level of anxiety in many learners. When a student’s focus is on communicating with a peer, however, she is often able to disregard the presence of the teacher (who is most likely busily taking notes in order to provide feedback to the speakers). As a result of this decrease in anxiety, the quality of the communication is considerably greater than it would have been if the student was speaking to the teacher.
  3. In my opinion, the authenticity of the communication is significantly reduced when one of the speaker’s primary motivation is assessment, rather than comprehension. In a teacher-student interpersonal assessment, the student’s goal is most likely to avoid errors, and the teacher’s is to note them as part of the feedback process. As a result, the communicative content of the conversation often loses its significance.
  4. Lastly, assessing pairs of students saves valuable class time. While I can generally assess all 30 of my students in one class period when listening to two speakers at a time, I would not be able to do so if I were assessing each one individually.

Suggestion #3: Use a great rubric. I love the one from the Ohio Department of Education (http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Ohios-Learning-Standards/Foreign-Language/World-Languages-Model-Curriculum/World-Languages-Model-Curriculum-Framework/Instructional-Strategies/Scoring-Guidelines-for-World-Languages/3-Interpersonal-Rubric_unit_august_2015.pdf.aspx ) because it includes an interculturality component, as well as great descriptors related to the quality of the interaction.  The wording in the comprehensibility section makes it clear that some errors are to be expected, even for those students rated as Strong. Knowing that the content and quality of the interaction are as important as accuracy encourages students to make more risks during interpersonal tasks. This risk-taking leads allows the learners to demonstrate greater proficiency than they would if their only goal was to avoid grammatical errors.

Suggestion #4: Don’t forget to incorporate culture. As I discussed in an earlier post, I am experimenting with using role plays in order to incorporate more culture into my novice interpersonal communication assessments.  My previous prompts, in which I asked students to discuss their own personal preferences and experiences, often failed to produce adequate evidence of interculturality.  On the other hand, I was pleased with the results I had during a recent holiday unit when I assigned a role to each member of the conversation pair. In this assessment, I asked one student to play the role of someone who had traveled to France for the holidays and the other to play the role of someone who had traveled to Canada.  When these students discussed the pictures they had “taken” (a Google Slides presentation I prepared), they were able to demonstrate their cultural competence in a comprehensible way, in spite of their Novice proficiency level.

I’ll look forward to hearing what has worked for you when assessing impersonal communication with Novice students!

 

Integrating Culture Across the Modes: A Noël Unit for Intermediate Low French Students

 

Christmas decorations

I’m taking just a few minutes for a quick share tonight.  In an earlier post, I shared some activities that I developed to integrate culture in all of the communicative modes with my Novice Mid students.  In this evening;s post I’m including a few lessons I created to do the same with my Intermediate Low/French 3 students.   Click here for a packet of activities and keep reading for a short explanation of each lesson.

Lesson 1: In this lesson I played a short video to introduce the tradition of the yule log cake.  I then assigned partners and gave each member of the dyad a different article.  The students read their articles and filled in the information they could find in the packet.  Then they discussed their information with their partner, who had read the opposite article.  Although I intended for the pairs to fill out a Venn diagram as described in the packet, due to time constraints the students just discussed their information and filled in the missing information for the questions in the packet.  This worked out well, as they did a Venn diagram in the next lesson.  Although I didn’t end up assigning the Presentational Activity, I had originally considered adding it, based on timing.

Lesson 2: In this lesson, one partner watched a video about Christmas tree traditions and the other listened to a video on the same topic.  They then discussed the information they found and completed a Venn diagram comparing the information in each source. As in Lesson 1, time didn’t permit me to assign the Presentational activities.

Lesson 3: As in Lesson 2, half of the students read an article while the other half listened to a video.  I was consistent in assigning A/B roles, so that the students who listened in Lesson 2 did the reading in Lesson 3 and vice versa. After the interpretation phase of the lesson, the students discussed their information and took a pair “quiz.”

Although these activities were challenging, the students remained engaged throughout the three class periods I dedicated to these cultural lessons.  Following the third lesson, I introduced the same story project that I described in this post from last year. I did, however, add an interpersonal communication task to the IPA/Learning Stations in which the students used circumlocution to complete these pair crossword puzzles (Partner A, Partner B). My students love these pair crossword puzzles and they were a very effective way to review aspects of French holiday traditions that the students had learned in past years.

Using Cartoons to Assess Interpretive Listening with Novice Learners

COUV. La Balle.indd

This week’s #langchat discussion about interpretive listening revealed that we language teachers are very diverse in the way we approach this skill, especially with novice learners. Although I reflected at length on the topic of assessing listening in an earlier post, I’d like to specifically address a few of the questions that came up during Thursday night’s discussion.

Question #1: What resources are appropriate for novice learners? While some teachers are hesitant to use authentic resources with early novices, I have found that first semester French 1 students can successfully interpret carefully selected authentic materials when given level-appropriate tasks.  My go-to resource for these students are cartoon videos for the following reasons:

  1. These videos were made for novice language learners—young children in the target culture! As a result, the vocabulary and sentence structures are relatively simple and the linguistic input is supported by strong visual cues. This is exactly what our novice learners need.
  2. The wide selection of these videos ensures that there are several choices available for any theme we’ve included in our novice curriculum. My favorites for my Level 1 and 2 students are Trotro, Petit Ours Brun and T’choupi et Doudou, because of the broad range of topics covered and the comprehensibility. I also occasionally use Peppa Pig with my level 2 students. Although originally recorded in (British) English, the French translation was clearly intended for French-speaking children, so I do consider these to be authentic resources.  However, the target culture would not, of course, be represented in these videos.
  3. Cartoons are very engaging to my students. They look forward to their turn at the computer and a few students have even mentioned that they have watched additional episodes of the series at home, “just for fun.”
  4. As authentic resources, these cartoon videos often integrate cultural products, practices and perspectives of the target culture. When Petit Ours Brun puts his shoes under the Christmas tree, his grandfather comments on the delicious turkey, and he wakes up to presents on Christmas morning, my students learn relevant cultural practices regarding Christmas celebrations in France.

Question #2: What types of tasks are appropriate for novice learners? I realized as I participated in Thursday night’s #langchat that I have interpreted ACTFL’s descriptors regarding interpretive listening differently than many of my colleagues. The Novice Mid (my goal for level 1) NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Benchmark for interpretive listening reads, “I can recognize some familiar words and phrases when I hear them spoken.”  If I understood my colleagues’ responses correctly, many of us may be assessing listening by having students list the words and phrases that they hear.  Because it isn’t clear to me how this type of task would demonstrate interpretation/comprehension, I ask students to answer questions to show comprehension of the video, but phrase these questions in a way that the students can use previously-learned words/phrases (along with visual context clues) to respond.  This year I am using a multiple choice format for my formative listening assessments using our district’s recently-adopted Canvas learning management system.  Although I don’t feel that multiple choice is appropriate for many language tasks, this platform has the advantage of providing immediate feedback to my students.  In addition, since creating and assessing them requires a minimal time commitment on my part, I am able to provide more opportunities for listening than I was using other task types.  Lastly, this format provides students with additional context clues.  Their listening is more purposeful as they are listening for a specific response, as well as to eliminate distractors. While I typically use open-ended question types on my IPA’s, these multiple choice quizzes, which the students complete individually at a computer, provide the majority of my formative listening assessments.

In order to save time, I create these quizzes directly in Canvas, which unfortunately makes them very difficult to share.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’ve uploaded a Word document of screenshots from a quiz I made this morning for the video, Trotro et les cadeaux de Noel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRcv1pVaitY ). As this document shows, the questions that I’ve created enable these Novice Low-Mid students to demonstrate their ability to interpret this text using only previously-learned words and phrases and visual clues. While most of the items assess literal comprehension, I’ve included a few questions that require the students to make inferences and guess the meanings of new words using context clues. Here’s a quick explanation of my thought process for each question.

#1: While each of these questions would be appropriate to the context, my students will probably understand “pour moi” when they hear it.  They will also be able to eliminate the 2nd choice, because they know the word for Santa.  Although I’ve used the other question words in class, the students are not using them yet.  I included them in the distractors to encourage the students to start thinking about how questions are asked.

#2: This question is a “gimme.”  The students know the word for book and have visual clues as further support.  I created the question to improve the students’ confidence, enable all students to have some “correct” answers, and to provide more context for further questions.  As you can see, I write LOTS of questions, because I find the questions themselves provide important context and help the students follow along with the video.

#3: “Chouette” is a new word for these students, but it appears in a lot of children’s literature/videos and I think they’ll enjoy using it.  The context should make the meaning of this word clear.

#4/#5: The students have learned the word “jeux-video” so I think they’ll get “jeu.”  Also because Trotro also uses “jouer” I think they’ll understand it’s something to play with rather than listen to.

#6/#7 Students can answer by recognizing the previously-learned words “gros” and “belle.”

#8: Although this question does not assess listening comprehension (the word appears in written form), it does provide a contextualized way to introduce a new vocabulary word.

#9: The students can listen for the word “content” as well as eliminate the distractors based on previously-learned words.

#10: The students have heard “maintenant” repeatedly, but it hasn’t been formally introduced.  If they don’t recognize it, they should still be able to eliminate the other choices.

#11: Although the students will not understand the entire sentence in which it appears, they should be able to answer this question by identifying the word “cadeaux.”

#12: I’m curious what my students will do with this inference-based question.  They should recognize the phrase, “Moi, aussi” which should enable them to infer that Boubou got the same gift.

#13: The students should recognize the word “jouer” as well as be able to eliminate the distractors based on previously-learned vocabulary.

#14: The students should be able to use the visual context to guess the meaning of this new vocabulary.

#15: The phrase “c’est moi” should enable the students to choose the correct response for this one. As with several other items, I’ve included the transcription of the entire sentence to introduce new vocabulary—the verb “gagner.”

#16: Although my students won’t be able to use the linguistic content to answer this question, I’ve included it to encourage inference based on visual context clues.

#17: I’ll be curious how they do with this one.  “Bateau” is an unknown word and although they’ve seen “mer,” I’m not sure they’ll pick up on it.  Some might pick out “pirate” but I’ll be curious how many are able to answer this one correctly.

#18: The students have heard “rigolo” and this word even appears in Trotro’s theme song.  In addition, they should be able to eliminate the distractors based on previously-learned vocabulary.

While there’s nothing especially innovative about this assessment format, after completing many similar tasks during their first semester of language study most of my level 1 students are pretty accurate when completing this type of formative assessment.

Question #3: How should interpretive listening be assessed? I did want to make a point about grading these formative assessments.  Although I do my best to create questions that are mostly at the students’ current proficiency level, with a few items thrown in to encourage “stretch,” I rely heavily on my students’ results to determine how close I came to hitting this target.  Therefore, I do not decide how to grade these assessments until I have data on how the class scored as a whole.  In other words, this particular formative assessment will not necessarily by worth 18 points.  If, for example, the highest score is 16, I might make this the maximum score. For teachers that do not record a score on formative assessments, this isn’t an issue of course.  I only suggest that we expect and allow for student errors when assessing interpretive listening (even using objective evaluations) just as we do when assessing the other modes.

I’d love to hear from any of you who are willing to share your experiences and ideas about assessing listening with novice learners!

Image credit: www.gallimard-jeunesse.fr