Week 8

Assessment Issues in Oral Language

Vera Gutierrez-Clellens's Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual Children was very close to my heart. After all, I grew up bi-lingual ; and so is my daughter. We have been lucky to learn more than one (two) languages early in our lives. My belief was that by osmosis or by innate instict you could learn and perform well in both languages as long as you were exposed to the language.

Learning that children who are in the process of becoming proficient in a second langauge may require greater resources for processing incoming narrative information has been enlightening. It had not occourred to me. Through the results of the experiments done by Gutierrez I can understand how the processing demands of the narrative recall had an effect on the children's comprehension of the story.

It is sad to see hispanic children who can speak and understand two languages, are not doing as well on tests as are students who speak only one language. One might think that the student who has knowledge of the more languages is a high-achiever. Yet, when not given the correct tools to process the language, it can be a barrier rather than a trampoline.

What I mean is that the studies demonstrated that the students are capable of understanding, but it suggests that teachers provice more resources for the comphrenesion.
I believe that the research strategies used in this study were very useful and creative. It provided the opportunity for the student to demonstrate his/her abilities in both languages, therefore avoiding the classification of low-achiever, or not capable of understanding. It also provided educators with the tools to help these L2 students comprehend and perform better in the L2. Performance is not the problem, but its assessment.

Fulcher and Marquez-Reiter's article about the difficulty in speaking tests was also a great article in which the conditions in which the tests are given affect the performance of teh test-takers as well as other elements related to the test. Speaking tests have always been to my belief, only a part of assessment. One can not define the proficiency of a student by a mere test.

According to Tarone and Ellis, variablity in physical setting, topic and the participants affect the results of the test. Fulcher argued that each test would be a test of performance in the specific situation. Tarone also argued that test scores can only 'tell us something about student ability on other test tasks and real-world-tasks that share the same characteristics."

It is argued that some tests are made about topics which the test taker is no expert about. This also affects the results. Cross-culturral pragmatics also play an important role in test taking. L2 learners come with a cultural background different from that of the new language and cultural differences and ways of viewing and interpreting situations are also rocks on the road that (impediments) that do not help speaker be assessed as best they could.
"Task difficulty in speaking tests is affected by the cultural baggage that the speaker brings to the specific act of communication."-Fulcher
Tests can be affected by cultural differences as well as task difficulty and experstise, and conditions of power (social power).
and many other external conditions that may have nothing to do with the test taker' ability.