I’m sure if you’ve been a teacher for any length of time you will have stumbled more than once at creating a valid and reliable test for your classroom. The question is, why are we always struggling along attempting to reinvent the wheel? Countless people before us have researched and implemented successful assessments for the classroom… the problem is, many of these are for the L1 setting.
If you’re following me, I’m talking about tests like Informal Prose Inventory (IPI), Early Names and Names Tests, St Lucia Graded Word Reading Test and so on and so forth. Assuming you’re familiar with any of these then you’ll know they tend to focus on reading skill primarily. And correct me if I’m wrong… but we our L2 students still read don’t they?
So, why can’t we use them in our classroom and cut back on some preparation time? Well.. there’s not reason why you can’t… A minor tweak here and there, modify some of the data analysis and away you go… assessment in hand.
Things like the Early Names and Names Tests don’t need to be touched. They focus on phonological awareness and give you an idea as to which areas of phonology are troubling your students. The St Lucia does something similar, but has the added bonus of assigning a reading age to your students. This in itself is nothing but a number… but let’s introduce the big daddy of the ones I mention above… IPI.
Without a reading age or intimate knowledge of your students abilities, the IPI can become pretty invalid. The material will be too difficult or too simple and the whole process will be fruitless… but let’s assume you select something in the right atmosphere for your students… you have a winner.
IPI is designed to be primarily a reading test. It is supposed to assess decoding skills, reading strategies, comprehension through question and answer… and also has a retell aspect that indirectly assesses speaking and structural awareness. …Now, let’s side step a little… you’re in a L2 classroom… how can you use IPI and what will it assess?
Assuming your students are literate in their own L1 – which is likely in most instances …unless you’re teaching refugees, asylum seekers or similar – then we can ignore the area of decoding skills and reading strategies as metalinguistic transfer from their L1 should take care of this. Instead, the direct read aloud aspect can be used to analyse and assess phonological awareness. Something of use to monitor progress and development in earlier level learners that wish to improve (reduce) their accent.
Comprehension Q&A covers some listening and speaking in conjunction with their reading comprehension. This is a typical part of most classrooms anyway, so it should be relatively straight forward for both you and your students. The trickiest part of the IPI comes with the retell.
There retell is meant to assess the students ability to summarise what they have just read… the flaw in this is memory and retention plays a part and can be an issue with lower level learners because of their L2 lexical development, but that aside… the retell is a fantastic tool for testing speaking in an informal fashion. If your students speaking is not at a level to comfortably retell the passage without duress, then perhaps this can modified into a written retell. Students are often more comfortable putting their thoughts on paper when they are early stage learners… so give them a few minutes to write their ideas (preferably in point form) and then ask them to retell in spoken form using their notes as a guide.
Of course, IPI doesn’t need be conducted with just the IPI booklets available…. use your own passages and articles if you are confident enough. It’s just that the IPI is already graded into levels complete with a marking guide for you to use, and while it may need a little tweaking to be of particular use in the L2 classroom, it can be a real time-saver overall.
Please.. drop us some comments if you have any L1 assessments that you have modified for L2 usage.
