Authentic Assessment for ELL Classroom Term Paper

In order to complete this activity, I will assess an oral language lesson plan using the w and h questions. The main goal of the lesson is to help the students perform tasks that will help them improve their speaking ability. The lesson is specifically meant for learners in grade three to grade five. The wh-movements are used in this lesson to show the interrogative clause.

They create a special ordering of words that help to achieve the interrogative clause. Examples of the wh-words that are used to form questions in this lesson include: why, where, when, which, what, and whose. The only exception in this category is ‘how’. The students therefore have to be able to use the wh-movement so as to create interrogative clause in a sentence.

Therefore in order to assess the learners’ whole ability, the teacher has to be able to give the students tasks that will ensure they use their ability. For instance, according to the lesson plan, the teacher identifies something in the classroom that the students see every day and then hides it.

The task is then to ask the students what is missing in the class. This task will ensure that the students speak and not just to mention one word but to describe events and how they happened. The teacher will not only ask the student what is missing from the class, but will also ask them individually when they realized that it was missing and who took it.

In a normal declarative sentence, the teacher could say something like ‘the chat is pinned on the board’. This sentence has the normal word order whereby it begins with a direct object, a verb and a subject. The teacher could then unpin the chat from the board and hide it. After which the students could be made to use wh-movement to form questions about the chat. Already, the students know some information about the chat.

They see it pinned to the classroom board daily and they also know its content. However they may not know where it is because it is hidden. The students could then change the sentence order by using the wh-movement words to form an interrogative clause such as this: ‘where is the chat that was pinned to the classroom board?’ another question that could be asked is ‘who took the chat that was pinned to the classroom board?’

The students can be allowed to form interrogative clauses using any of the wh-movement as long as the question makes sense. Even though the movement of the wh-word can be used differently in subordinate clauses and other relative clauses, the main focus for the lesson would be the main clauses.

The students have to be able to identify the main verb that moves in the sentence in order to appropriately use the wh-movement at the beginning.

Since the lesson is an oral lesson, then the intonation for the questions asked has to be emphasized. Questions normally have a rising intonation when orally expressed. The teacher has to ensure that the intonation comes out clearly when the students speak out the questions.

Finally, the formed interrogative clauses can also be expressed either as past tense or present tense. Here, the use of auxiliary verbs has to be emphasized since when used with other verbs in a sentence, they help create a tense.

Reference

Kelley, A. (2010). Titled “This Is Your Life,” this lesson involves a Family Tree, Interviewing, Childhood Treasures, and Writing. Web.