Year 5
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 5 Languages
Assessment Principle 4 Assessment should be designed to meet their specific purposes
French: Second Language Ma communauté (My local community)
Languages/French: Second Language/Communicating/Socialising/Informing/Understanding/Systems of language
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Initiate interactions with the teacher and peers, using descriptive and expressive language to exchange information about their home, neighbourhood and local community community, for example, J’habite dans une vieille maison à East Fremantle, près de la rivière et un grand parc; La ville est à deux heures à pied Participate in guided tasks related to organising displays, planning outings and conducting events such as performances, or activities such as building models Gather and compare information and supporting details from a range of written, spoken, digital and multimodal texts related to their personal and social worlds Gather and convey information and ideas in different formats from a range of texts related to their personal and social worlds Recognise and apply features of intonation and pronunciation such as using liaisons (joyeux anniversaire), silent letters (h), the aigu –é and conveying meaning with pitch, stress and rhythm Use context-related vocabulary and develop and apply knowledge of grammatical elements in simple spoken and written texts to generate language for a range of purposes, including:
Recognise that spoken, written and multimodal French texts have certain conventions and can take different forms depending on the context in which they are produced |
Nature of the assessment
Reading for information in a written text, matching places with their function.
Drawing and labelling a diagram based on instructions.
Written description.
Oral presentation of city plan.
Purposes of the assessment
To elicit information about students’ ability to comprehend written French and convey factual information about what they have read. Also to establish information on their ability to write and speak in French using descriptive 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
- exposed to a variety of texts related to the neighbourhood and local community
- taught grammatical elements, including: using additional prepositions to indicate direction or location; formulating questions using Est-ce que… ?; observing the relationship between subject pronouns and verb endings, using je/tu/il/elle/on/vous + present tense of verbs associated with familiar actions and environments, -er, -ir and -re verbs and common irregular verbs such as avoir, être, aller and faire
- taught the textual conventions of a plan, a description and a presentation.
Assessment task
The teacher provided the task to the student and explained that there were three parts to the task and that the task would be conducted over two lessons.
In Part A, students were to read the information in the table and match the places in the left hand column with information about what occurs in those places in the right hand column.
In Part B, students were to draw a plan of a new city for a competition. They were provided with a list of buildings that they needed to include.
Part C, was conducted in the second lesson. In Part C students were to share their idea for a new city with their class, first writing a description of the city using full sentences and prepositions in French, and then presenting the description to the class. They were advised to prepare to speak in French for at least 3 minutes.
Assessment process
Students had previously engaged with texts and classroom discussion based on the neighbourhood and local community. The teacher explained that the purpose of the assessment task was for students to show their understanding of the vocabulary they had learnt in class and then how they could apply that learning to the design of a new city and the presentation of their design to the class. The teacher walked around as the students completed the first part of the task, checking for understanding and guiding those students who required support. During the second part of the task the teacher observed the students.
Using the information
In administering the matching exercise, the teacher noted that there were gaps in the learning of some students, and where necessary, guided them. The teacher used the observations to reflect on the task and decided to refine the first part of the task for the other Year 5 class.
The teacher used the information on the rest of the task to determine the students’ ability to write in the French language and to present their design in spoken form. As the third part of the task was open ended, there was the opportunity for all students to demonstrate some learning in the French language. Some students responded with short, modelled sentences and few details; others responded with descriptive language, providing a detailed description of their plan for a new city.
The task highlighted the diverse ways that students approached the different parts of the task. 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.