In this Activity I am going on a mission! I will be assessing the task and deciding whether it could be used in my teaching context or not.
Context
Russian-speaking immigrants from Russia and Israel, aged 30-45. The vast majority of them are young professionals who moved to Canada with their families and kids. Their English proficiency level is CLB 2. They are learning English to integrate faster, to expand their career opportunities and social connections.
Assessment
The assessment will be measuring speaking skills of the students - reproductive task. The students will be able to introduce themselves and share simple information about their family. If a student doesn’t feel comfortable talking about his/her family, they may choose to talk about their friend’s family or a family they know. The assessment will consist of two tasks. The first task will be to introduce yourself and tell a short story about your family; the second task will be to answer simple questions about yourself and your family.
The assessment includes five criteria such as ability to use non-verbal features such as eye contact; ability to provide information in an appropriate manner, answer simple questions, and others. The overall performance will be measured based on the student’s ability to construct short sentences when sharing personal information and respond to simple questions in an appropriate way. Student’s skill level will be assessed using the scale where the values consist of points - not achieved (1), partly achieved (2), achieved (3), achieved easily (4). Success will be defined by achieving the score of 70% or higher.
Is the task appropriate for the CLB level of the students?
Profile of Ability for CLB 2 says that the speaker can communicate basic personal information using short phrases and some sentences. In the features of Communications we can see that the communication short and face-to face, informal, in non-demanding context. In the Sharing Information section it states that the student will be able to give expanded basic personal information to a supportive listener ( teacher) by answering simple questions about personal information. One of the sample tasks in this level is to introduce self and respond to another person's introduction. So, yes, we can say that the task is appropriate for this level of English proficiency.
What are the possible challenges?
Students at this level are only able to understand very short, simple sentences. It is important not to overwhelm them with long instructions and criteria description. This may influence the reliability of the assessment. I’d suggest to write instructions and criteria in the simplest way possible and maybe go over an example with students to make it more clear for them.
Another possible challenge is that this assessment ( especially in the second task) might lack content validity, which is important in grading students in a consistent way. The student won’t be able to know what questions he/she will be asked and might be lacking certain vocabulary. Now, as I am writing this, I think it would probably be a better idea to distribute the list of possible questions the students can be asked so that the speaker don’t get a question that he didn’t expect.
References
Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks. (n.d.). English as Second Language for Adults. Toronto, ON: Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks. Retrieved from https://www.language.ca/publications/english-publications-downloadable/
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