home

=Proficiency Oriented Assessments=

This page is being created for the faculty of the [|Department of Modern Languages] at [|Western Kentucky University].
===Its purpose to to provide a place to record what we are doing in our FL instruction that is proficiency oriented. Perhaps no assessment is 100% proficiency based, apart from the ACTFL OPI type of assessment of oral expression, in particular. What is of interest here are assessments, summative or formative, of speaking, writing, listening and reading. Often such assessing involves task-based elements and an emphasis on cultural authenticity of components and situations.=== ===This page grew out of a meeting of the Department of Modern Languages on October 19, 2010, where it was decided to find out for strategic planning purposes what we may be doing that is moving in the direction of proficiency assessment and away from assessments that would determine student learning without performing the very acts of speaking, writing, listening and reading. Sven Anderson, Susann Davis and Nathan Love agreed to form the committee to carry out the survey. Every faculty member of the Department of Modern Languages is invited, indeed encouraged, to respond! -- Nathan Love===

For a French 102 course in the fall of 2010, I substituted a portfolio that I call a PPP (Proficiency Project Portfolio) for the final examination. Each student created a portfolio within Blackboard made up of a number of written documents and one oral document as the project for the course. The project consisted of planning and then reporting on a short visit to Paris, France. Students filled out a hotel reservation form, made a list of clothing they would bring, wrote a note to a French friend, telling them how to find the hotel and inviting them to dine out in Paris, made out an itinerary for each day of planned events (tours, museum / monument visits, concerts, movies, church services, etc. and a different restaurant for each day for dining). All of these documents were written from authentic French Web sites. Students were in effect planning a perfectly possible visit with actual hotels, real restaurants, films currently being shown, and the like. In short, students were engaged in reading authentic French for functional purposes. They turned in these documents over several weeks with much feedback from the instructor and multiple revisions. Finally, they submitted a written report of the entire visit in the //passé composé// -- in short, the itinerary was turned into a guided composition with the past tense, and recorded a somewhat briefer version of their trip by making (and recording) a telephone call recounting the trip to a French friend. Thus they wrote and spoke French in a functional way, as well. I decided that all those who received an A or B on the project would be exempt, if they wished, from taking the final examination. The assessment project covered everything on a final examination of a more conventional sort, except for listening comprehension. Since all students had already been assessed for listening comprehension multiple times, I did not judge that omission alone to invalidate the project as a final summative assessment. When one clicks on each item in the portfolio table of contents, the document becomes immediately visible and the telephone recording plays. See illustration below. -- Nathan Love

Next person:

German Oral: “Calling to inquire” Best for: Upper level students, or students who had at least two semesters of German During the semester, students are introduced to vocab & cultural differences concerning -hotels, youth hostels, travel agencies, etc., from booking a room to ask questions. -For the Oral Final, students get a time frame of about two hours in which they can call a phone nr. (most likely my office nr.) and book a room or inquire about prices, etc. -each student has about 5 min. for the phone call -There will be a person on the phone who speaks the target language exclusively (either me or a colleague) -grade consist of the following skills: -Is the student able to uphold a conversation? -Is he/she able to ask questions? -Does he/she answer appropriately? -use of vocab