Year 1
Languages Support Materials
Overview
The central purpose of assessment is to understand where students are in their learning. Assessment refers to the broad range of strategies teachers employ to obtain information about their students’ skills and understandings, and ranges from asking students questions during a lesson to giving students a formal standardised assessment.
The assessments need to provide information about the depth of students’ conceptual understandings as well as their accumulation of knowledge. They should support teachers in identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses, and provide detailed diagnostic information about how students are thinking, so that the teacher is well placed to know what students have mastered and what they need to learn next.
Year 1 Languages
Assessment Principle 1 Assessment should be an integral part of Teaching and Learning
Japanese: Second Language Uchuujin (Alien)
Languages/Japanese: Second Language/Communicating/Creating/Understanding/Systems of language
| Content Description |
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Participate in listening to and viewing a range of short, imaginative texts and respond through action, dance, singing, drawing, collaborative retelling and responding to prompt questions, for example, だれ ですか；ちいさい です か；おおきい です か；かわいい ですか Use simple language structures and supporting drawings or actions to describe and respond to imaginary characters or experiences, for example, おに は こわい！；いっすんぼうし は ちいさい です； ももたろう は つよい です Notice and use context-related vocabulary and some first elements of grammar to generate language for a range of purposes, including:
Understand that language is organised as ‘text’ and that different types of texts have different features |
Nature of the assessment
Drawing an image in response to information gathered from a spoken text.
Oral description of a stimulus picture.
Purposes of the assessment
To evaluate students’ ability to comprehend spoken text in order to convey in written form a simple description of an alien. Also to establish information on their ability to describe animate objects in simple, modelled spoken language.
Stage in the Teaching sequence
At the end of the teaching cycle as a summative assessment.
Background learning
Students have:
- been taught context-related vocabulary relating to body parts, colours and adjectives
おおきい、ちいさい、ながい、みじかい、ふとい、ほそい - practised using the grammar structure adjective + noun です
- rehearsed drawing characters from descriptions in Japanese spoken texts
- rehearsed giving oral descriptions of characters from stimulus pictures.
Assessment task
In Part A, the teacher read a story to the students about an old woman who encountered an alien. The students conveyed their understanding of what they heard by drawing a picture of the alien based on the description provided in the story.
In Part B, the students sat individually with the teacher and were shown a stimulus picture of an alien. They were asked to describe the alien in spoken Japanese using five full sentences.
Assessment process
After administering the first part of the task, the teacher collected the students’ task sheets and marked them using the marking key as a guide. For the second part of the task the teacher made notes on the students’ vocabulary and grammar use and their pronunciation. The responses were recorded so that the teacher could view them and gather further details about their progress.
Using the information
The teacher made use of the drawings and oral descriptions to determine students’ listening comprehension skills and speaking skills in Japanese.
As the oral description of the stimulus picture was open ended, there was the opportunity for all students to demonstrate some learning in the Japanese language. Some students responded by pointing at the alien and naming colours, shapes or body parts with single words; others gave phrases with an adjective and a noun, while others described the alien in full sentences.
The teacher used their observation to guide further lesson planning and to inform end-of-semester reporting.