El campesino y la princesa (a Spanish 3 story test, with a bit of subjunctive)

Today I gave my 3rd quarter story test in Spanish 3. It's about a peasant and a princess who get married despite the facts that they just met and her father doesn't approve. It uses a lot of the vocab we've worked on in Spanish 3 this quarter. There's a mistake on the question part--I left a de out I think--but if there's anything else I blame it on sleep deprivation, lol.

A Spanish 2 story test

I've been out for a while--Christmas was a whirlwind, and then I landed in the hospital for 5 days with a severe infection. The baby weathered it better than I did, but I finally feel like I'm recovering. Enough to get back to the blogosphere anyway!

In any case, here's the story test I gave my Spanish 2 students in December. It's about a boy whose brother wakes him up wailing about his lost turtle, who turns out to have been kidnapped by aliens. My students did very well with it and found it pretty fun. The question that tripped them up the most was "¿Dónde vivía Lester?" A lot of my students read it as "Where was Lester?" and they answered it "en frente de la casa." An odd question to miss, I thought, considering the frequency & familiarity of the verb vivir. Perhaps they were working too fast and just skipped the verb.

A story test

My assessment has recently shaped up to be that I have 5 test grades in each quarter. We have a high school policy that except in math, tests form 50% of the student's grade, and daily grades the other 50%. So test grades are pretty important, and I've been accused of not having enough tests in a quarter before. This is because I hate paper tests. It's so hard for me to really assess what was going on in the student's head, communicatively, and assign a number value to it. But it's a requirement, so I suck it up. And figured out a way around it, sort of.
One test grade per quarter is a grammar-based test. (A Spanish 1 example is discussed in this post.)
One test grade is the accumulation of the semi-daily story quizzes. (These are six-to-twelve point quizzes given at the beginning of class to assess their comprehension of a. the question b. the story and c. their notes on the story.)
One test grade is their in-class participation (how much they listen, watch, talk, and focus).
One test grade is a communicative project.
And one test grade is a story test. I write a story using as much target vocabulary and features as my creativity will produce, ask a bunch of questions about it, and take that for a test grade.
The second quarter story test in Spanish 1 can be found here. It's about two kids who aren't at school because it's summer, so they decide to play for three hours in the water with their very clean dog, LJ. Then LJ is not so clean, so mom gets mad and LJ ends up in the bath. Everyone lives happily ever after, LOL.
I'll post Spanish 2 and 3 story tests soon.

Grammar learning vs. acquisition

My 38 Spanish 1 darlings just turned in a stack of projects--they had to describe and illustrate five family members, at least one of them a plural set, at least one outside their immediate family. They had to tell me 1) what their name was, 2) ¿cómo es?, and 3) ¿cómo está?

We worked on it some in class and they turned it in before they did so marvelously on their test, and I think it had a lot to do with those good scores. Also, I was SO happy while I read it. Spanish 1 students are going to make mistakes, naturally, but not all mistakes are created equal. When they map English onto Spanish, la profesora Sarita is not so feliz. If they're overgeneralizing their Spanish, it's still counted points off, but la profesora Sarita is pretty feliz.

Check this out: Not one of my students wrote Su llama es.... Amazing. I don't know if you get that, but my Spanish 2 students incessantly put that in their writing and blogs. It's aggravating. They're taking their English structure and mapping it onto Spanish even though they "learned" this structure in week 2 of their Spanish 1 class (with a different teacher) last year. I did get a couple of Mi padre es llama... and I wonder if they were going for "My father is named...", but I just had one student do that for all 5 family members, and another for 2 out of 5.

So what about the overgeneralization? My biggest grammatical error was Mi padre se llamo but the same student would write Mi prima se llama. Wow! They know that o words are boy words and a words are girl words, and they're overgeneralizing that to verbs. They still lost 6-8 points for it, but there's a mistake I'll take any day over English mapping!

Trust me, a commitment to communication and "natural-ish" acquisition is SO worth it.

Forced to give grammar tests?

Diane from foreignlanguagefun.com left me this comment on my previous post:

"I teach using immersion, stories, TPR, music . . . but then I have to give common assessments. Although they are proficiency-based, there is a lot of isolated grammar, etc. I'm fascinated by the "no warning" tests. Of course, it makes perfect sense and is a much more valid assessment piece. Yet, it's still completely outside the "way things are done" --at least here in my public high school. When I taught at a private middle school, I had more freedom. How did you make the shift? School & parents supportive? I know your methods work, but how do you get others on board?"

I got a similar question when I gave a session called Assessing Comprehension without English and this fall's KWLA conference. For one thing, it makes me realize how fortunate I am to work with people who trust me to run the Spanish program the way I choose, so I was able to reject using the curriculum tests and workbooks last year, and this year rejected the textbook altogether. I didn't know quite what to answer, but what I said was this: Fight for it. I've never taught in a public school, so I don't know if you can even do this, but I'd call the administrator on the fact that he or she has no idea what language acquisition entails and therefore has no right to impose assessment judgments on you. Language isn't learned like any other subject, and you can't test it that way.
Other suggestions:
See if the department will let you use their test, but modify it to fit a more communicative approach. Can you change a question to elicit the same target feature (i.e. the form digo) by asking a communicative question instead of giving a multiple choice?
See if the department/administration will let you alter the weighting of the test. Can you weight the common tests lower and supplement with your own communicative tests?

To answer the other question, I shifted from announced tests to pop tests quite abruptly. I heard a couple of teachers mention it at a TPRS workshop at the 2007 KWLA conference, and I implemented it the very next week. I just told the kids that I wasn't going to tell them when tests were anymore. But I promised that I wouldn't put anything on a test that I hadn't asked several times in class in several different ways, and I always promise my students not to have unrealistic expectations of them. At first they threatened to mutiny, lol, but they got over it. Every once in a while they'll bring it up. This week one of my Spanish 3 cherubs was working on a test and said, "You know, in every other class, the teachers tend to let us know when tests are coming..." But he was joking and trailed off. They know it's not going to change. And parents have been nothing but supportive. Most of the students have also. Really, it's amazing how you can win people over when you have all the logic on your side!

High aptitude is a beautiful thing

I've been grading these Spanish 1 tests lately. This is the test (for some reason the clip art didn't publish well on Google docs). They did extraordinarily well on it. The average was somewhere around 32-33 out of 38 points possible. And keep in mind, all my tests are given with no warning at all. You may wonder why I'm so excited over it, but think about it--how many Spanish 2 (or even Spanish 3 students, ¿verdad?) could sit down, on the spur of the moment, and use es and está accurately to describe someone? Much less five times!

Anyway, as I'm reading through, I'm astounded by how well they do and how little grammatical explanation went into it. They still fight with the singular/plural difference, but still, there are certain kids who just pull it all off flawlessly. The thing that's most amazing is when I pause and stare at something and thought, I never taught them that. Some do things because they learned them elsewhere, but sometimes there's just enough evidence to believe it's acquisition in 14 weeks of Spanish 1. It's awesome for a linguist to look at hard evidence of what natural acquisition is and does--and with the high-aptitude students, we get to see it extra early. :)

The verdict on pop test 1

I teach two sections of Spanish 1, with 19 students in each class (my classroom won't hold any more than that). I haven't taught Spanish 1 in the three years prior to this year and I have to say I'd forgotten how much fun it is.

Anyway, the pop test went reasonably well. There were 54 possible points on the test. In the first class, the average grade was 48.8, range 29-54. In the second class, average was 45.6, range 28-53.

Section 2 didn't have time to complete a writing exercise that the other class did, and that writing exercise was important to the essay portion of the test. If I'd realized in time that the second class hadn't done this, I would've repeated it with them before the test. Hindsight's 20/20. But overall a success!

I'll post an excerpt later, but for now I'll say briefly that I don't use any translation on my tests. Ever. Not even in vocabulary matching. I almost never use English in formal comprehension assessment.

A pop test

All my tests are unannounced (except finals, because that's the way my school dictates it).

My Spanish 1 kids are taking their first pop test right now... I'll let you know later how it turns out!