STANDARD6 – Assessment The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher’s and learner’s decision making.
Name of artifact: Vocabulary enhancement activities TESOL/INTASC Standards Addressed: Standard 6.a., 6.d., 6.e., 6.f., 6.g., 6.j., 6.k., 6.p., 6.q., 6.r., 6.t. Rationale: One artifact I chose to show my understanding of assessment strategies is the Vocabulary Enhancement Strategies I created for TSL 692- The Teaching and Acquisition of Vocabulary, which I took in the fall semester of 2013. The strategies are part of the final project of the class in addition to a position paper on vocabulary in teaching second/foreign languages. For the “enhancement” of the vocabulary in the chapter of an ESL textbook I designed six different activities to improve teaching of vocabulary for the chapter. The “enhancements” I developed are a measure of ongoing development of the learners’ vocabulary and are formative assessments. These assessments use the vocabulary words drawn from a short reading and activity four, in particular, is a performance based assessment. The creation of these “enhancements” helped engage learners in multiple methods of assessment for vocabulary. I drew the methods of vocabulary assessment from Folse’s (2011) book Vocabulary myths, in which he lists types of exercises for practicing vocabulary including creative or generative use of new words (Nation, 2001) or using a word in a way that is different from the first encounter. Included as part of the final paper the vocabulary “enhancements” came from a textbook I purchased for this purpose because I am not currently teaching. The textbook is referenced in the beginning of the exercise. I learned there are different kinds of vocabulary items or words. For each “enhancement” activity I provided a rationale to explain the vocabulary learning concept associated with the activity. In his book, Folse (2011), made this task easy by providing many exercise ideas to use in incidental vocabulary retention. The vocabulary exercises via the text book usually are fill in the blank and from what I have seen there are not multiple exercises to enhance vocabulary retrieval for the student. When I created the enhancement activities I tried to use vocabulary activities that would help the student “touch” (Folse, 2011) the words differently. This means they encounter them in different forms. I learned about creative or generative use of words from Nation (2001). Simply put, retention is greatly enhanced by using the word in a way that is different from the original encounter. In the textbooks for this class I also read that the best retention strategies for vocabulary processing include label-to-concept processing instead of the reverse (Kameenui, Dixon, & Carnine, 1987). Also, I learned about receptive retrieval which requires learners to see or hear the word and gain meaning. This retrieval is opposite from productive retrieval which askes the learner to produce the word. I used a variety of approaches in this exercise and broadened my view of vocabulary learning, teaching, and testing of vocabulary.
References Folse, Keith. (2004). Vocabulary myths. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.
Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press. New York. Name of artifact: Final exam for Spanish 1 class Course: TSL 692 – Special Problems – Teaching Vocabulary TESOL/INTASC Standards addressed: Standard 6.b., 6.c., 6.e., 6.g., 6.h., 6.j., 6.l., 6.r. Rationale: I am using my final exam for Spanish One under Standard 6 – Assessment. I taught one year during the 2013-2014 school year at Fayette Ware High School. We had a block schedule so the final exam took place in December of 2013. The teachers are required by the district to give a comprehensive summative exam to document learner performance. During this semester I was enrolled in TSL 692 – Special Problems – Teaching Vocabulary. I tried to implement some strategies for vocabulary assessment that I learned during the class. I designed activities to increase saliency of words to the meaning of sentence. During the class TSL 692 – I learned about the value of explicit teaching of vocabulary. Whether teaching or testing a range of exercises and activities need to be used for receptive retrieval and productive retrieval of words. At the end of my course TSL 692 Special Problems- Vocabulary I tried to implement some of the instruction into the testing. The other two teachers and I made a collaborative effort to create a final with all of the sections covered in the class because we might have a student of one of the other teachers in Spanish 2 in the spring. We paced the class weekly covering similar material each week. The block schedule makes Spanish one half year and Spanish two is the other half of the year. Pacing was important to keep students together in what was taught. I learned that textbook and premade tests do not always cover vocabulary adequately. I have one section of learning words from a list with a simple definition for the family section. The semantic sets of expressions with “tener” were initially not taught in clusters, which aided the learning of vocabulary. In my class TSL 692 Teaching Vocabulary I learned that not enough emphasis is placed on explicit teaching of vocabulary. During most methods of language teaching vocabulary is not emphasized and Folse (2011) even said vocabulary was relegated to the “stepchild” position in the study of language. I want to definitely place more emphasis on vocabulary instruction in the future. Although my artifact contained elements that the other teachers wanted I want to implement more vocabulary in context in the future.
References
Folse, Keith. (2004).Vocabulary myths. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.
Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press. New York.