Become a more confident language teacher.
If you attended my workshop on QAR Strategies for Differentiating Questions at iFLT this past summer or its condensed counterpart at AFLA just a few weekends ago, you will be happy to see this post! If you didn’t, I hope that you will be happy to have found it once you’ve read through it. QAR (Question-Answer Relationships)…
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In a Comprehensible Input classroom that uses Standards Based Assessment, we must format our question-based activities differently based on whether our goal is to provide further repetitions of the text and the structures that it contains (a ‘reading activity’) or to assess whether or not a student comprehended the text. If the goal is to provide…
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One common question that I was asked in my sessions at iFLT ’14 was, “I thought that our goal is to provide students with comprehensible input…so why do so many of these activities contain output?” Great question! Is output bad? No comprehension based teacher thinks that output is bad. Output is a good thing and one of the end…
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About two months ago, I wrote a post explaining how second language teachers can use the Common Core Anchor Standards for Reading to give depth to their reading assessments and challenge students to think critically in the target language. Read it here. Understandably, some readers were left wondering what an assessment composed of CCSS Aligned questions…
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It is important for all teachers to informally assess students’ comprehension throughout any lesson in any content area. When we ask a comprehension question, we use students’ response to determine whether it’s time to move on to the next topic, or if we must spend more time on whatever we are studying at the moment.…
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Scott Benedict is the king of assessment, so if you have never before pondered accurate assessment, standards-based assessment, etc., you should probably hop on over to his site, Teach for June, and spend the next few weeks there before you come back and finish reading this post. If you have already reached the conclusion that it…
Read MoreA good teacher is always looking for ways to vary his or her assessments. Administering varied assessment types allows for differences in student strengths and weaknesses and provides novelty. Novelty is important because it makes the assessment feel less like an exam and more like an activity, which reduces anxiety and lowers the affective filter,…
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My maternity sub is unavailable on one day during finals week, so I needed to develop a new final exam for Spanish II that did not involve the use of the computer. (Last year, I gave my students this exam based on the video La leyenda del espantapájaros.) Wanting to do as little work as…
Read MoreI continue to experience the same problem with each reading assessment that I assign, and I am wondering if anyone else experiences it as well and/or has input and suggestions. When I administer a reading assessment, I make absolutely certain that it is comprehensible to my students. If there are any words that my students…
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This week is conference week in Anchorage. At the middle school level, we do Student Led Conferences, in which students prepare a portfolio that includes work samples and self-reflections and present it to their parents. Teachers check in during the conference to see if parents have any questions, but the student is responsible for explaining…
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