Year 2

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 2 Languages

Assessment Principle 4 Assessment should be designed to meet their specific purposes

Indonesian: Second Language Berapa rambutan merah? (How many ripe rambutan are there?)

Languages/Indonesian: Second Language/Communicating/Informing/Understanding/Systems of language

Content Description

Convey factual information about their personal worlds using familiar words and phrases, simple statements and modelled language

Notice and use context-related vocabulary and understand some first elements of grammar to generate language for a range of purposes, including:

  • using different question words and the anticipated answer, for example, Siapa?; Apa?; Berapa?; Di mana?
  • referring to numbers   of things using cardinal numbers, for example, nol-sepuluh, puluh, belas
  • describing the characteristics of things using noun-adjective phrases, for example, buku merah, anjing besar, kucing saya kecil, Bapak saya tinggi, saya pendek, Ibu saya lucu

Nature of the assessment

Written responses in Indonesian to stimulus pictures.

Participation in an oral interview.

Purposes of the assessment

To assess students’ ability to comprehend written text and images and convey their understanding in short written responses. Also to establish information on their ability to convey in spoken form simple descriptions about fruit and the speaker’s opinion of that fruit.

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 and grammatical items, including:
    • numbers up to ten
    • colours and adjectives to describe fruit, for example, merah, hijau, enak, kecil, besar, bulat, lonjong
    • phrasing, for example, rambutan merah; rambutan hijau
    • discussing likes and dislikes, for example Saya suka/Saya tidak suka
  • taught the textual conventions of an interview.

Assessment task

The teacher provided the students with the task sheet and asked them to count the rambutan fruit, distinguishing between the colours of the fruit. The students conveyed this information by completing the task sheet, providing short written responses in Indonesian.

The students then demonstrated their skills in speaking in Indonesian by describing the fruit pieces that they were shown by the teacher.

Assessment process

For Part A, the students were given the task sheet and asked to count the ripe red rambutan and unripe green rambutan and write the number that they identified in the table in Indonesian.

For Part B, the teacher interviewed the students one at a time. The teacher prepared different fruits on a plate for the students to view, touch and taste. The teacher than asked the students simple questions in Indonesian about the fruit. The students were encouraged to respond in Indonesian.

Using the information

There was some ambiguity in Part A as some of the students were unsure if certain rambutan in the picture were red or green, as some fruit had both red and green parts. Some students had difficulty distinguishing between the green fruit and the leaves. Other students were concerned about misspelling the Indonesian numbers. As this was a written task there wasn’t the opportunity to resolve these issues with the students. The teacher reflected on the task and decided that in future Part A be completed as an oral task, allowing for clarification of misunderstandings as they arose.

Part B was an open-ended task that allowed students to clearly demonstrate their speaking skills. The teacher was able to repeat or rephrase the questions, or scaffold the responses for the students who required support. The more able students were provided with the opportunity to give more detailed and complex responses. The teacher used the information from this task to inform future lesson planning and to make judgements on the students’ achievement for end-of-semester reporting to parents.