Year 3
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 3 Languages
Assessment Principle 2 Assessment should be educative
German: Second Language Wer bin ich? (Who am I?)
Languages/German: Second Language/Communicating/Socialising/Informing/
Understanding/Systems of language
| Content Description |
|---|
Interact and socialise with the teacher and peers, using simple descriptive or expressive modelled language and gestures, to exchange information about friends and family members, for example, Ich habe einen Bruder und zwei Schwestern; Das ist mein Onkel; Meine Schwester ist zehn Jahre alt; Sie hat blaue Augen; Mein Vater ist sehr sportlich und intelligent. Er spielt sehr gern Fuβball und liest gern Comics. Ich liebe meine Oma; Meine Mutter ist schön
Locate specific points of information in a range of short written, spoken, multimodal and digital texts related to their personal worlds Convey factual information about their personal worlds in simple statements, short descriptions and modelled texts Create and present short imaginative texts, that use familiar expressions and modelled language as well as simple visual supports Use punctuation rules in German such as capital letters for nouns, full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, commas and quotation marks Notice and use context-related vocabulary and apply elements of grammar in simple spoken and written texts to generate language for a range of purposes, including:
Recognise the particular language features and textual conventions in simple, familiar, spoken, written and multimodal German texts |
Nature of the assessment
Reading for information in short written texts.
Written riddle based on a family member.
Written description of family members using descriptive modelled sentences.
Purposes of the assessment
To assess students’ ability to comprehend written text by locating key information and conveying it in different ways. Also to establish their ability to write in German both creative texts such as riddles as well as descriptive texts such as writing a description of their family members in a family album.
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 describing family members
- practised using grammatical structures including adjectives, possessive adjectives, punctuation, definite and indefinite articles
- been provided with a variety of texts related to family members
- been exposed to the textual conventions of a riddle and a description, and provided with opportunities to practise them.
Assessment task
In Part A, students were to demonstrate their ability to comprehend written text as they had to match written descriptions to images and words.
In Part B, students were to write a riddle about a family member and share it with their class.
In Part C, were asked to complete a family photo album by describing three members of their family.
Assessment process
The teacher provided the students with the task sheet and advised them that there were three parts to the task and that they would be completing the assessment over two lessons. The teacher provided students with Part A of the task and asked them to look at the images of the family members and read the text. They were asked to draw a line to match the description in the text with the correct image of the family member. Finally, they had to write the name of the family member in the right hand column. After administering Part A, the teacher collected the task sheets and marked them using the marking key.
For Part B, the students were required to use the models in Part A to write a riddle based on a family member. They then read their riddles aloud to their peers and the teacher made notes on the students’ vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.
For Part C, conducted in the second lesson, the students were provided with materials to create their family albums. Students were asked to select three family members to describe and write at least three sentences about each family member and draw simple illustrations. After administering Part C of the task, the teacher collected the family albums and, using the marking key, assessed the students’ writing.
Using the information
The teacher used the matching activity to make judgments about whether the students were able to comprehend the information in the riddles. The riddles that the students wrote and shared were used as a formative assessment. The teacher corrected any grammatical or vocabulary errors and gave verbal feedback to ensure students learnt the correct grammar and vocabulary.
The teacher gave detailed written feedback to the students on the family albums produced. Copies were made of the family albums to go on display in the classroom. Having the family albums in the classroom as a resource made the creation of them a purposeful and meaningful assessment activity for the students. They would often return to the albums and view language structures as a model for their writing.