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ENGL 528, S’11

Sample Assessment

PART 1

This assessment is one of the first pieces of written formative feedback that my adult ESL students will receive in the English 083 Listening and Speaking at Wor-Wic Community College. Thanks to the “gatekeeping” COMPASS test, my students are roughly the equivalent of a “High Intermediate” proficiency when they begin the course when compared to the Maryland ELP State Curriculum. And this course is the only focused instruction Wor-Wic offers ESL students for their speaking skills before Speech 101. The assessment presented here is one that I piloted this semester, but am working to improve because it is meant to give students some non-threatening feedback on their speaking skills as well as describe a couple concrete areas for improvement. The course objectives that are related to the assessment are 1 and 2: “Use correct vowel and consonant sounds” and “Appreciate the role of rhythm, intonation and stress in spoken English.”

PART 2

English 083 “About Me” Presentation

Overview: Once, in the first few weeks of this semester, you are required to give a concise presentation about yourself. You should use creativity and multimedia (pictures, illustrations, “show-and-tell” items, etc.) to give the class a clear picture of everything we should you about you!

Requirements: The presentation must be 5-7 minutes long. That means it must last at least five minutes but no longer than seven. Because we have many things to accomplish and a busy schedule, presentations that do not meet the time requirements will be severely punished. The presentation must use any variety of multimedia—pictures, illustrations, music, passing items around. The presentation must be clearly organized and easy to understand. Most importantly, the presentation must be all about you!

Due Date: Your presentation must be given on the date you chose randomly on the first day of class. Your presentation is due: _____________________________ (Write the date here!)

Grading: The presentation is worth 10 percent of your grade in the course and it will be evaluated by the rubric, or grading scale, below.

RUBRIC:

	25	20	15	10	5	0
Clarity	The entire presentation was easy to understand	Most of the presentation was easy to understand	Some of the presentation was easy to understand	The presentation was very difficult to understand	The presentation was not clear at all	There was no presentation
Length	The presentation was between 5 and 7 minutes	The presentation was within 1 minute of the requirements	The presentation was 90 seconds off of the target	The presentation was within 2 minutes over	The presentation was very long or short	There was no presentation
Creativity	The presentation was engaging and creative. Wow!	The presentation was somewhat interesting	The presentation was not very interesting	The presentation was not creative at all	The presentation was very boring	There was no presentation
Multimedia	The presentation used a variety of multimedia	The presentation used some multimedia	The presentation used very little multimedia	The presentation was all lecture or pictures	The presentation was silent and pictureless	There was no presentation
TOTAL	________________/100

INSTRUCTOR’S NOTES on YOUR PRESENTATION:

PART 3

I piloted this assessment tool this semester, and I have mixed feelings about the results.

The benefits were clear: it was easy to administer, it gave the students a subject that they seemed to feel very comfortable speaking about, the other students really enjoyed hearing more about their classmates, and it gave me an opportunity to get to know much more about my students than I might have learned otherwise, and I did get to give one or two pieces of specific feedback for each student regarding a pronunciation pattern of error or a syntactical problem that recurred through the presentation. It also was a great confidence booster, for the students reviewed the assignment with some fear and trembling, but concluded their paragraph and answered their peers’ questions confidently and assertively. Smiles filled the classroom.

But the problems with this activity also quickly manifested themselves in obvious manners. I’m not sure how effective the rubric is to give students much formative feedback aside from written comments, which I had to provide ad nauseam to make up for the short comings of the original rubric. Additionally, the rubric is not very well aligned with the course objectives (which may be in need of revision in their own right—I inherited them and have not yet felt confident in rewriting them as my own).

I’d like to use this assessment again next semester, but I’d like to revise the rubric in a way that will make it more a more valid measure of the students’ actual speaking ability while still making it a non-threatening activity.

I will most likely add a few more categories of checklists to the rubric so that I can not only evaluate the categories personally, as the instructor, but also give the students an idea of the specific categories that they can work on through the semester to improve their skills.

For instance, the “Clarity” category could be split into subcategories (as Brown suggests—I read ahead because I needed help on this!) like “Pronunciation” which can be split into “Vowel Sounds,” “Consonant Sounds” to follow the course and lab work that students are working on, and “Word Stress,” and “Grammar” which can follow Brown’s chart on page 172, and be augmented by specific comments like I did overall this semester, and also “Vocabulary” and again, I’d like to use Brown’s scale or something like it. In order to keep these criteria from being non-threatening, I’ll probably weight them on a smaller point scale than the creativity, length, and multimedia categories. Additionally, I’d like to add a mandatory “Question and Answer” portion to the assignment. It was an unexpected byproduct of the pilot of the activity. The students were very intrigued by the each others backgrounds and asked many questions of each other. It would have been great, as an instructor, to have been prepared for this and been able to give credit to the students for being very capable, fluent, and proficient in their answers!

After the activity, I will make a copy of the assessment sheet about the students’ presentations, and this will be a great way for me to compare their work early in the semester with their work later. This way I can chart their progress with specific concerns I have regarding their speaking ability (one of the slipperiest skills to measure, for as Brown says, “Eliciting the specific criterion you have designated for a task can be tricky”) and develop appropriate curriculum and activities throughout the course and track the students’ progress and encourage them along the way.