Estimados colegas,
I have written about this before, but I feel like I really need to get a better handle on this issue. I have some ideas here, but I need some more.
In order to accurately assess our students, it seems to me that we need to address the idea of language plasticity—the phenomenon of wildly disparate abilities in language acquisition—a bit more thoughtfully.
Here is what I mean: According to some linguists, an 18 year old of normal cognitive ability may know between 10,00 and 70,00 or more words in their native language. That is a huge gap. Gaps like that do not exist in most other areas of life. Even the most gifted athlete cannot run seven times as fast as a normal healthy person.
The gaps in language acquisition ability are real, but here is the crazy thing: we cannot tell the difference between those that have high ability and those that have low ability just by talking to them in English. When adolescents speak to one other outside of school, they only use between 500 and 800 words per day. When they are talking to one another, they all sound about the same. The way students talk on the street is different, and far less complex, from the way they need to talk in school.
ELL teachers have know about these difference for years. It is the difference between conversational language and academic language. In lower level foreign language classes (levels 1,2, and 3) we are attempting to get our students fluent in conversational language. Without it, they do not have a prayer of understanding and using academic language in levels 4, 5, AP, college classes and in professional life.
Although we attempt to teach foreign language naturally and conversationally with TPRS, there is simply not enough time for students to acquire it in a completely natural way. There is an academic element to it. And in this academic sphere, some students begin to take off. They begin to acquire language MUCH faster than their fellow students. The seven-fold gap begins to show up, even when we are using solid, proficiency-based methods that focus on Comprehensible Input and TPRS.
Since language ability is so diverse we need a way to assess that reflects this gap rather than a straight linear scale. The gap between high ability students and their normal classmates is much larger than the 11% difference between a 90% A- grade and a 79% C+ grade. We need to find several different ways to measure these varying abilities.
Here is one way that I am using this year (we need more):
VOCABULARY QUIZZES: ENGLISH to TARGET LANGUAGE
OPTION A:
Make a vocabulary quiz with the target language words where students write the translation in English (in higher level classes they can define the words in the target language). Put in some words that the class hasn’t used as much but that the advanced level students may have heard or read before and which they will know better than the basic level students.
Basic Write the meanings for 10 words
Extended Write the meanings for 15 words
Advanced Write the meanings for all 20 words
This is a way of letting the superstars show their knowledge (which is what superstars love to do) and yet not punish the kids who are acquiring more slowly. It also gives a way to hold the advanced students more accountable than the extended level students, who are in turn more accountable than the basic level students.
In a multi-level classroom (and ALL of our classes are de facto multi-level classes), one of the biggest challenges is making students realize that you are expecting the upper levels to really handle the language better than the lower levels. It is not fair to grade a basic level student with the same criteria as an advanced student, but you do not need to teach completely different content to do so. The basic level students do not have the same grasp on the material so it needs to be modified for them.
I am not totally satisfied with this option because it is not proficiency based, but it is at least a starting point.
What are some more ways for us to differentiate our language assessments?
Bryce