Rationale
Oral
The oral strand assesses and tracks the progress of the student’s communication skills:
- Listening: Tracks student’s ability to listen and reply for various reasons. The student’s proficiency is measured from beginner, intermediate, advanced, and grade level. Beginners are able to answer questions with single phrases or words in English. They can follow instructions for routine activities using pre-taught English phrases and words or visual cues. Intermediates can follow multi-step instructions and respond to an oral text that is simplified. Advanced students use some grammar and vocabulary in their responses to a text.
- Speaking: This element measures student’s ability to use language features like vocabulary in a grammatically correct and comprehensible way. Beginners use personally meaningful vocabulary and prefer non-verbal communication. Intermediates only use key vocabulary and a few complex words. Advanced students can use different grammatical structures and use selected vocabulary to increase communication clarity.
Reading
- Fluency: This element measures the ability to understand known and unknown phrases and words in written text. Beginners have the ability to understand pre-taught vocabulary and frequent words. Intermediates can use suffixes, prefixes and root words to decipher what unfamiliar words mean on top of comprehending pre-taught words. Advanced students use different strategies to understand unfamiliar words and can comprehend most of the vocabulary they encounter in grade-appropriate texts.
- Meaning: This element tracks students ability to understand and respond to text. Beginners can only draw meaning from simply worded or highly visual texts. Intermediates can draw meaning from respond to simple text and instructions with few steps. Advanced/Grade-level students can draw meaning from and respond to a big array of grade-appropriate texts and follow instructions with complex steps.
Writing
Here, writing is seen as a process involving progression from prewriting, idea organization, the act of writing, and editing:
- Language Conventions: This element assesses the ability to spell both familiar and unfamiliar words using different approaches. Beginners can only write frequent words and key personal information. Intermediates can correctly spell subject-specific vocabulary, while advanced students are comfortable with grade-appropriate unfamiliar words.
- Developing and Organizing Content: This element assesses the ability to organize information and ideas. Beginners display this ability with key information, employing single phrases and words and visuals. Intermediates use familiar models to organize their information and ideas, while Advanced learners have some form of structure in their written text, using supporting details where applicable.
Grammar
This element assesses student ability to make judgments about an utterance’s appropriateness and acceptability with reference to grammatical notions. In other words, it is how well a student follows English conventions to structure their words and sentences and select punctuation marks. Beginners are only proficient in pre-taught conventions, forms and structures. Intermediates use some appropriate sentence structures, conventions and punctuation marks, while advanced students are comfortable with using a vast array of grade-appropriate conventions, sentence structures and use punctuation marks to clarify meaning.
As intuited from the rationale above, most of the grammar and vocabulary will be assessed in the module exams, the quiz, and the writing portfolio. This performance and assessment table is for recording a single student’s oral, reading, and writing capabilities together with their performances in the quiz, writing portfolio, and end-of-module exams. It also includes a comment section on the last three components where the teacher can input their observations on the student’s progress through the module. The teacher is expected to use the rationale when assessing student abilities. The rationale includes the milestones to look out for during evaluation and includes three stages: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. These stages show student’s abilities and can be used to create appropriate interventions.