Teaching Spanish: Assess Conversation
Interview Students to Hear Their Listening and Speaking Proficiency
Since listening and speaking Spanish must be assessed, students need to do just that for the teacher in an organized fashion, and in little time. Teachers can follow easy steps to create, implement, and evaluate a basic Spanish interview to assess conversational skills.
Old School Spanish Assessments
Most Spanish teachers have been trained to create and evaluate tests on grammar and vocabulary groups because this is efficient, objective, and it appears logical. Students write their answers in Spanish onto tests, and they are evaluated on their overall Spanish knowledge and the written application of this.
Memorizing vocabulary and figuring out grammatical structures like algebra have little to do with speaking practical Spanish in everyday situations. These old school tests are really deficiency tabulations where they total up what students don't know about Spanish grammar and vocabulary.
Oral Proficiency
Teaching students to speak and use Spanish consistently invites grayer areas of proficiency that can be unfamiliar. Teachers need to evaluate what students can do in Spanish instead of what they don't know.
The best way to figure out a student's Spanish speaking proficiency is to give the student an interview. The interview combines the conversational basics with course content. The teacher listens carefully to the student and takes brief notes.
The American Council for the Teachers of Foreign Language has developed official proficiency levels and interview techniques for students of all. The best training is for Spanish teachers to attend official ACTFL workshops. See ACTFL.
Creating the Interview
The interview contains familiar conversational questions and vocabulary or content that the students have used frequently in class. The key is flexibility; the most authentic interviews contain spontaneous questions and answers; a hard and fast script won't elicit the most natural language.
Jot down the following as a general template that can be deviated from. Make sure to include questions including greetings and salutations, daily life, preferences, and if the student's proficiency is advanced enough, actions in the past, future plans, and conditional situations.
- ¿Cómo te llamas?
- ¿De dónde eres?
- ¿Dónde vives?
- Cuéntame de tu familia.
- ¿Vas a qué escuela? ¿Te gusta? ¿Por qué?
- Cuéntame de tu profesor favorito.
- ¿Qué haces en tus ratos libres?
- ¿Qué vas a hacer este fin de semana?
- ¿Adónde fuiste el fin de semana pasado?
- Si tuvieras una millión de dólares, ¿qué podrías hacer?
Interviewing the Student
Let the students know a few days before hand that you, or you and another Spanish teacher will be conducting interviews. Allow for time in class for plenty of practice. Teachers can draw names from a hat, start alphabetically, or take volunteers to begin.
- Sit with one student in a space with some distance from the rest of the class.
- The trick is to keep the class busy while the teacher is interviewing: writing assignment, individual or group reading activities, draw and label tasks, pair or group work
- Ask the student each interview question from a prepared list in a clear, but relaxed and welcoming manner.
- Write down as much of the student's actual answer for later reference
- Feel free to naturally deviate from the list of questions
- Move on after about ten to fifteen seconds if the student hasn't answered
- End the interview-conversation on a fun, light, and positive note
Evaluating the Student's Speaking Proficiency
Again, the definitive training source for assessing and evaluating Spanish speaking proficiency is ACTFL. Teachers can, though, develop their own ways to evaluate the student's proficiency. Evaluating what a student can do while speaking requires a wide, forgiving lens.
Students should be evaluated for speaking with clear communication as opposed to grammatical mastery. The message is the priority, not necessarily the way it is said. If an answer is understood it is correct if the meaning and intent are there.
Students can be ranked in superior, excellent, high, average, and not there yet categories according to the clarity of their answers and the chances they took in conversation. Narrative descriptors are best to describe speaking proficiency, but if teachers must assign A-B-C grades to the interviews than they could be:
- Superior A+
- Excellent A/A-
- High B+/B-
- Average C+/C-
- Not There Yet D+/F
Understanding and speaking Spanish should be the priorities of Spanish classes, so they must be assessed. Creating, implementing, and evaluating a Spanish interview to assess conversational skills just takes a little thought, planning, and an open mind.
