Llamame, por favor.


DESCRIPTION:

Oral grades for foreign language classes can be tricky.  Classes can range in numbers from 15 to up to 25 students.  Oral quizzing is time consuming and it can be difficult to manage the other students in the room while working with an individual.  I came up with a plan to address my oral quizzing quandary.  Students are given an instruction sheet with a rubric and are asked to call my school voice mail.  They are to leave me a message in Spanish according to the guidelines given.  Each class group has a time frame in which to complete the assignment from home on their own telephones.  This type of assessment can be used to evaluate any number of foreign language curriculum topics.  The documents that represent this particular artifact are two examples I have used in my teaching.


ANALYZE:

I chose this artifact because it represents a form of communication.  Communication is an essential element if not the most essential element of language learning.  Why learn a language but to communicate.  It also represents an alternative form of assessment which can allow for success for different types of learners.



APPRAISE:

This artifact represents a useful tool for oral evaluation of students in a foreign language classroom.  The use of voice mail enables me to listen to a student’s work as many times as I need to complete my evaluation.  Also the discipline problems caused by other students while the teacher works with individuals are completely avoided.  The teacher can completely focus on what the student is saying.  If a teacher spends 10 minutes with each student completing an oral assessment in class it can take up to a week of class time.  By asking students to complete this work from home, that valuable classroom time is freed up.  Students also seem to appreciate and value this method of evaluation.  Some students do not feel comfortable speaking in front of the whole class.  The use of voice mail eliminates this anxiety for those students.  The students also appreciate the chance to practice at home before they call me.  I have had some students leave more than one message if they felt there was a problem with the first one.  Some voicemail systems allow a message leaver to hear their message back to see if they want to change it.  That type of voice mail would be ideal for this type of assessment; unfortunately ours at school does not have this capability.  

I consider this method of assessment to be positive and effective but there are weaknesses associated with it as with any type of assessment.  Quizzing with voice mail can be more time consuming for the teacher.  The messages need to be checked immediately and this (at least with our system) needs to be done outside of class but inside of the building, as we cannot check our school voice mail from home.  It is of most importance that the messages be graded quickly because of the size of the mailbox.  There are only 30 slots in our school voice mail accounts so in order to assess more than one class, the teacher must assign the message to one group, give them a time frame and assess and remove the old messages to begin the cycle again with the next class.  This same issue can cause problems if students don’t complete the assignment in the allotted timeframe.  There can be an overlap and you run the risk of running out of slots for the students who are on time to accommodate those that are late.  An aspect I named as positive could be also considered negative.  Students are given the material and the time to practice so this type of oral assessment does not evaluate a student’s natural response to spoken prompts in the target language.  This must be evaluated by another method.