Standard 6: 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 teachers and learners decision making.
Artifact 1 Journal reflection of my SPA 102 & 201 classes
Class: FL 694
National Standards for Foreign Language Learning: 1.1,1.2, 3.2, 5.1,5.2
In order to display my understanding of Standard 6, I have chosen a
journal entry that I wrote for my FL 694 class at the beginning of that
semester. In this journal, I have written about a particular student who was
showing improvement in Spanish speaking skills. He was definitely
motivated to speak in Spanish and he was not worried about making
mistakes. The spring semester that he was in my SPA 201 class was the
second class that he had taken with me. He was never the shy type but this
semester he began speaking more in Spanish, I believe simply because it
was all coming together for him and making more sense. At the time that I
wrote the journal entry, I said that I was going to try to get him motivated to
study abroad. I did not know it at the time, but he was already interested in
the study abroad period and was making plans to try to gather the money so
that he could go either this summer or the next. I dont think he was able to
go this year, but I know by the end of my Spanish 201 class he was making
plans to minor in Spanish. Because I had this student in my class for two
semesters I was able to monitor his progress. He ended up being one of the
seven students that I interviewed for my action research project and he
indicated to me in that research that he enjoyed the challenge of trying to
understand what I was saying in Spanish and that he thought it was
necessary for me to speak in Spanish as much as possible in class so that his
Spanish would improve.
The second part of my journal contains reflections that I wrote about
an activity that I did with my SPA 102 class that reveals in my opinion a
formal assessment that I did of them that day. The objective of that activity
was to make sure that my students understood how to use verbs in Spanish
that have irregular yo forms. That is they do not form the yo form of the
verb like the rules say they should. These irregular yo form verbs had to be
memorized so in order to give my students some practice, for this activity,
they had to write sentences using the irregular yo verbs and one of their
sentences had to be false. Then volunteers read their sentences to the class
who then had to try to guess which of the four sentences was the false one.
Some of the sentences, though grammatically correct, were off the wall. We
really laughed that day and they showed understanding of how to use the
verbs with irregular conjugations in the first person, yo.