[marniefitz]

We completed two oral language assessment tasks with Grade 4 students. We used the “What did you have for lunch?” and amended the weekend recount to “What did you do on the holidays?”.
We found that although the students language skills are reasonable for two students who have been in the country for 6 months to two years respectively, they actually required a lot of scaffolding in question asking, turn taking and conversational skills. One of our students also has additional needs, so this also impacted on the dynamic of the conversation and the fact that the students knew each other outside of school.
Therefore more pre-preparation work was required for them to perform well. In particular, asking open-ended questions and follow-up questions was challenging for them. In fact, both students would have performed much higher in answering the questions, if the teacher had have asked the questions rather than the students.
This highlighted for us, how our focus during sessions isn’t explicitly on conversational English. The tasks were worthwhile, but would need to be built into a unit about this topics, so that we could assess what the students had learned.
Marnie and Angela

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