View Content #19089

Paul Sandrock is the Director of Education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. He is the author of numerous books, including The Keys to Assessing Language Performance, the second in ACTFL's "Keys" series.

Assessment tasks are designed to gather appropriate evidence that will identify progress learners are making toward the learning goals.  For Interpersonal Communication, assessment needs to match the characteristics of this mode, as described in the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages:

• Initiating and sustaining the exchange, such as through following up with appropriate questions, reactions, or additional information
• Negotiation of meaning, that is observing, monitoring, and adjusting the message to ensure that meaning and intention are being communicated, plus asking for clarification when there is a lack of communication
• Interaction and collaboration, increasingly aware of cultural patterns for interaction and each other’s perspective
• Spontaneous exchanges (not memorized dialogues)

To translate these characteristics into valid assessments of performance, keep focused on what would be authentic in a real-world interpersonal task.  Thinking about the daily types of exchanges of information, reactions, feelings, or opinions, leads educators to create more purposeful assessment tasks.  Several times each day in our professional and personal lives, we discuss and argue, make plans or change them, work on projects together, exchange information to help someone out, and come to agreement or consensus.  Keeping assessment authentic changes what educators ask learners to do.

Focus on a task that requires sharing or collaboration. The Interpersonal task should consider the verbs used to elicit the performance.  Learners do not really need to interact and negotiate meaning if asked to share, report, tell, or describe. Those are verbs more appropriate for Presentational tasks.  To generate real collaboration, consider using phrases such as come to agreement, find out how much you have in common (or differences), prepare a plan to present, and add what you each have discovered on the topic in order to create your shared conclusion.

Create an assessment that allows learners to use what they have learned, not one that specifies vocabulary or structures that must be used.  The important evidence at the end of a unit, a semester, a program is not another version of evidence covering all the vocabulary and grammar already captured in assignments, learning checks, and quizzes; rather it is asking learners to use what they have learned, now applied in real life tasks based on familiar contexts.  Learners may or may not use recently learned vocabulary or grammar; the focus needs to be on using all that the learners have at their disposal (vocabulary, structures, functions) in order to accomplish the Interpersonal task.

Let the learners be who they are, so that the content of the exchange is not something they need to memorize or facts they are trying to remember.  As one example, instead of being market sellers and buyers (where the conversation will be a predictable set of questions and responses), set up half of the learners to be market sellers, while the other half circulate in pairs to agree on what they should buy for their favorite teacher.  The Interpersonal assessment is in how well the pairs of learner-shoppers interact to accomplish their task (and then the shoppers and sellers switch places so the other half can be assessed).

Support the exchange with authentic materials.  In real life, people function in the Interpersonal mode as they gather around a computer screen, look at an article or review, examine several menus to make selections, share photographs, or look at their cell phones at past messages or calendars.  Rather than making learners simply stand and talk to each other, provide authentic resources to which they can react and which will provide ideas and vocabulary to keep the conversation going.

See this week's Activity of the Week for ideas for authentic interpersonal assessment for novice, intermediate, and intermediate high/advanced learners.