Sabrina has shared a clip that she did of one of her students whom she interviewed at the end of last year. She showed it in Agen as well and reports that people were “very happily surprised, even the French!”
Here’s a little background. Brie was a 1st year French student at Thomas Jefferson High School with zero French when she started in August 2014 and this interview was conducted in June 2015. She is a superstar obviously.
We no longer assess speaking in Denver Public Schools, but Sabrina wanted to run a little experiment at the end of the year. So she asked her students to read a book of their choice for ten minutes at the beginning of class over the last two months of school, May and June, primarily from a choice of TPRS readers. After they wrote a summary of what they read, Sabrina also told them she would interview them on their reading and then ask them to have a one on one interpersonal discussion for a few minutes to assess their gains.
Sabrina reports:
“I was pleasantly surprised with most of my students who answered my questions and talked about their reading. After Brie finished her book summary I decided to go on with the conversation and ask her random questions from my “Star of the Week’ questionnaire since she had not been “Star of the Week”.”
Here are my anecdotal observations:
1) It was totally spontaneous and unrehearsed since she had no idea I was going to ask her those questions.
2) It measures interpersonal speaking.
3) Her affective filter was low since you can hear her laugh a lot.
4) If she was unsure of what my question meant she would clarify in English, which is what people do in normal situations.
5) You can hear her ease in answering my questions whether they were asked in present, past, conditional, future or any other tense. That reaffirms that it does not matter in which order you introduce them. It is not about grammar but about communication that is interesting, personalized and totally comprehensible.
Here is the link:
https://vimeo.com/130672932
Password: Brie