Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Many public schools have used the Exprsate Level 2 Spanish textbook in class as both a
teaching tool and a resource for students. It is an intermediate level textbook designed for middle
and high school students learning Spanish as a foreign language. Its intended audience should
have prior knowledge in Spanish, ideally the content in the Level 1 textbook in the same series
that includes beginner language skills and use of the present tense. Based on the National World
Language Standards, this textbook has a user friendly format that gives teachers an abundance of
resources and teaching tools to use within the classroom including chapter assessments, a
midterm exam and a final exam. Many school districts choose to use this textbook series as it is
that the book has created are neither reliable nor useful in the classroom.
Because my district curriculum is based off of the Expresate Textbook Series, I am often
modifying the assessments and materials they provide. As a teacher I need to be able to gather
data from the assessments I use in class, and thus I need to be very diligent in planning tests,
quizzes and assignments. With that being said, I normally create my own assessments based on
the material taught in the Expresate Level 2 textbook. In this essay, I will examine a unit exam
that I have personally created which aligns with the Expresate curriculum. To accomplish this
and prove its validity I will analyze what the test measures, how the questions are structured, and
places, locations, weather, descriptions of cities, and using the metro. It is intended to be given to
students in the class who have completed chapters 1-3 in the textbook and specifically have
finished the T y tu Comunidad Unit in the course. The students taking the test can range from
10th grade through 12th grade, depending on when they take Spanish 2 throughout their secondary
education. The exam is considered a criterion-referenced test (CRT) in that it assesses language
ability in terms of how much students know in absolute terms, that is, in relation to one or
more standards, objectives, or other criteria, and not with respect to how much other learners
know. (10) Criterion-referenced tests generally grade on percentage of answers students got
correct, rather than on percentile of achievement. In the case of this test, there were five cut
more heavily compared to a typical quiz. With that said, teachers, students, parents and even
administrators are all interested in the outcome of the exam. For instance, students and parents
want to know how the exam will affect their overall grade either positively or negatively.
Teachers want to know how his or her students perform on specific objectives to gauge if the
class should move on to a new unit or the teacher should take time to reteach certain concepts.
Administrators may be interested in the data as well as the test has the possibility to affect a
students quarter grade dramatically and contribute to class failure rates. However, it seems as
though that occurs only in rare cases. While a teachers job is not directly dependent on this one
isolated exam, the student achievement results are still an important factor to consider in the
course.
The exam has a total of twenty nine questions and an additional short answer essay.
Teachers administer the test in the classroom and students are unable to use any materials to help
them. The only items needed to take the test are a copy of the exam, an answer sheet and a
number two pencil. The test has a total of four sections: listening, reading, vocabulary and
grammar, and writing. Most of the test is written in multiple choice or true and false questions,
however there are also several constructed response questions as well as one short answer. Due
to the tests length, it is advised that students are allotted at least an hour to take the exam, if not
longer, and students requiring extra accommodations should be provided with such. It is also
recommended that the classroom teacher give the exam in that someone with an advanced
knowledge of Spanish is needed for proctoring. The test is a summative, discrete point
assessment that is graded both objectively and subjectively given that there are various styles of
questions.
The test begins with a listening section in which the students will watch a video clip. The
clip is a commercial for the Metro in Madrid, Spain that was released in 2009. As the watch the
video, they have multiple choice comprehension questions to answer in Spanish that shows they
were able to recognize what was going on in the commercial. Some questions are simple and the
video itself can give clues to the answers, however for most questions students need to listen to
the target language in the video to select their response. After the video clip is played, the
students also have two short answer questions to respond to in English that ask about the cultural
perspectives of using the Metro. Students would be able to use prior knowledge from the unit
along with their own personal experiences to answer these culture questions. This is an authentic
listening activity because it is an actual commercial for the Metro made for native Spanish
speakers. This section addresses the units cultural objectives about using the Metro in Spain.
While the questions are quite simple, the language in the clip is very fast and so to compensate
for this, easier questions were used to assess the main ideas. Because I chose to use an authentic
source, it was naturally at a higher level of language than my students currently perform and thus
She describes where she lives, what there is to do in the city, and her opinion of living in
Barcelona hitting the majority of the units objectives. Students are required to read the passage
and answer true and false questions to demonstrate their understanding of the material. Due to
their intermediate level, the true false statements are in Spanish, and the answers can all be
proven within the text or inferred from context clues. If revising this test to use in future years, I
may add more comprehension questions in Spanish that are multiple choice to elicit higher level
unit. All of the sections are effective in that they assess key objectives from the unit. Within the
vocabulary and grammar portion, questions are isolated into sections determined by what they
are assessing. This helps students narrow down the possible answer choices because the majority
of questions are constructed response fill in the blanks. The section with city vocabulary was
written with a word bank because students could interpret several possible answers without
options. On the other side of the coin, they also could be completely lost without a word bank.
However in the weather section, no word bank was provided because this is more of a review of
concepts learned in Spanish 1. The section assessing the concept of using quantitative adjectives
not only evaluates the grammar of how to use them but also the meaning of the words
themselves. The final grammar section calls for students to create their own sentences that state
the location of specific places. Overall, each individual section is concise in the learning
city and describe it in detail. This essay is a culmination of all language concepts they learned
throughout the unit, and it also gives students the opportunity to include any cultural information
they have learned. The essay hits all major unit objectives and students are graded on
grammatical accuracy as well as spelling and punctuation. I chose to incorporate a writing task
such as this one because there were some unit objectives that were a major part of the unit
however they were not assessed in the vocabulary and grammar section. For example, in the unit
students learned how to describe cities with adjectives and state why they like or dislike them.
Since description is a level 1 concept in our Spanish curriculum, I chose to incorporate it in the
reading section for comprehension of vocabulary, and then let students construct their own
descriptions in the final writing section. This allows me to gather data on how well students can
understand the language of city description but also how well they can affectively perform the
objective themselves.
For a unit exam, this test is seemingly reliable in that the majority of the test can be
scored objectively. Also, I can estimate my students doing fairly well on the exam because I
create all of my lessons and assessments following a backward design model. In this method, I
start with what I want the students to be able to do with the language, and then from there I
create lessons that will teach them such language and assessments that will score their
progression and proficiency. It is a practical assessment that is easily administered and resources
to take the exam are readily available. It uses authentic materials and stimulates real life
language use by incorporating several forms of communication. The one element absent from
this unit assessment, however, is a speaking portion. While students are assessed on the language
they are producing on their own, they are only producing it in written form. Because of this,
when I give this unit assessment, I also pair it with a brief oral test in which students are to
respond to unit topics in the target language. The oral test would incorporate all of the same
material as the written exam, however teachers would be able to assess their pronunciation,
conversational speech and fluency. If the speaking component is left out, then the teacher is not
able to accurately assess his or her students on all unit objectives because not all forms of
communication can be evaluated. While writing and reading skills are important and written test
data can provide a lot of useful data, it is important to test all areas of communication so that
and students. It takes all unit concepts and assesses how well a student knows the material
through three modes of communication: listening, reading and writing. The test itself is
comprehensive, and after students finish the exam, the teacher will have a clear idea of what
areas his or her students did well on as well as the areas that may need some more attention. The
directions are clear and concise throughout each section of the test and questions were designed
in a way to avoid negative washback. While I personally enjoy administering more interactive
performance based assessments, this exam has its advantages in the ways that it evaluates aspects
that are sometimes missed in such performances such as listening and reading comprehension as
well as writing mechanics. Teachers can easily use data from this assessment to interpret how
well his or her students have understood the material and they also are able to analyze what the
students can produce on their own in writing. If all unit assessments are designed like this
specific test, and teachers make a conscious effort to incorporate separate oral assessments
throughout the unit, they will have created reliable and authentic assessments that measure
Bibliography
Carr, N. T. (2011). Designing and Analyzing Language Tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.