chart with your questions.
. Reading-aloud passage. Select a reading-aloud passage suitable for your students. Include your instructions, and indicate what criteria will be used for grading your students performance .. Guided Techniques.
1. Paraphrase. Select a little story for your students to paraphrase. Write out suitable instructions. (The story is to be read aloud to them.) Provide three or four simple line drawings that can help students recall details from the story.
2. Explanation . Write out five explanation items, such as Tell how Moslems observe Ramadan. These should be on your students level. After each item, write out a model explanation.
3. Guided role play . Prepare two guided role-plays to test your students with. These should be equal in difficulty. In other words, the same kinds of questions should be asked on each. Only the subject matter should be different. In parentheses, prepare a model student response following each line that the teacher speaks.
C. Oral interview. Prepare a 20- item guided oral interview appropriate for your students. Include yes/no, wh-, and either/or questions. Also include statements. Include one or two questions that get the students to offer some kind of correction or modification. Also include at least one question requiring clarification. Include at least two or three questions. Make sure that most of the questions have some logical relationship to adjoining questions.
6. Dictation and its importance as a control
is one of the guided- writing controls. Most teachers about this technique, but few handle it properly. Actually, this is one of the easiest controls to use, and it gives very good information on the student s language ability. But this is true only if you prepare it right, present it right, and score it right. You can get good results from a dictation if you follow the steps listed below.a Dictation, choose a story or article that is not too difficult for your students. You can pick a selection from the reader that you use in class. Even better would be a selection from a reader on a slightly lower level. The length of the dictation depends on whether it is used alone or with other language measures. If it is a part of a larger test, you can use dictation 75 to 100 words long. If it is used by itself, you will want a passage about 125 to 200 words long. (These are, of course, rather general guidelines) .careful to choose something that is unified able to stand alone. In order for your students to do their best, they must understand the meaning of the whole thing. You may even want to read your selection ahead of time to a native speaker or to another English teacher to see if he understands it. One way of helping to provide needed unity for a dictation from a longer passage is to write an introductory sentence or two. Here you can summarize what preceded the part that you are using. If necessary, you can also add a summary sentence or two at the end. Unless you are evaluating punctuation, it would be best to avoid a passage with much quoted material in it. Also avoid a passage containing a lot of names and dates and numbers, unless you need to test the ability of students to write out dates and numbers. Of course you can edit or take out a few troublesome words if the passage is suitable otherwise. After you prepare the modified version, the next step is to decide where the pauses should come. It s here where we will stop for students to write down what they have just heard. Aim for about seven or eight words between pauses, but allow for as few as five and as many as nine or ten words per group. You would very seldom go below five words. Let the structure of the ten sentence serve as a guide. Longer sentences can be divided between clauses and phrase groups. Place a slash (/) at each point that you plan to pause. Be sure to mark the passage in advance- not at the time you are administering the dictation. If more than one teacher is using the same dictation (and you want to compare the classes), marking the pauses will help make the test more uniform. You should also write out a common set of instructions for the teachers to read aloud to the classes. These directions should be worded simply. For beginning classes in which all students speak the same native language, you can even give the instructions in that language. You can also help to provide uniformity by taping the dictation and by having two teachers score each paper. This not essential, however. the Dictation controlhelp students do their best, be sure they know how to take a dictation. You can help assure that th...
