Novice Performance on Personalized Final Exams
From the mouths of babes
They’re masters at prepping their classmates, since they’re novices too:
“Hoy soy científico.”
And the circumlocution was astounding:
(for bow hunting presenter) “¿Qué animales tú…no más vida?
Videogames were a popular topic:
(comparing versions of Assassin’s Creed) “No, tres es abajo. “
(describing features) “Es famoso para muchos muertes.”
(comparing consoles) PRESENTER “¿Qué saben de Microsoft?” AUDIENCE “Sólo quieren dinero.”
They’re even comfortable enough to tease each other in the target language!
AUDIENCE “Mi favorito está tú” PRESENTER”Pero no te quiero.”
PRESENTER “Olivia es feo.” AUDIENCE “¡Mi corazón!”
AUDIENCE (during películas de miedo presentation): “¡Quéeeee! ¡Nooo, mis ojos!”
AUDIENCE “Lo siento, pero Scary Movie no es película de horror.”
Are novices allowed to get this profound? Audience questions and responses:
“¿Es feminismo más importante de otros movimientos?”
“¿Es el meta de feminismo posiblemente?”
“Yo quiero crear un quantum computadura.”
You can see they still make toddler-like mistakes, but most of them still have a toe or two in the Novice level, and according to AAPPL descriptores, even Intermediate Low means “You can do all of this in a way that your teacher and others who are used to language learners can understand what you are saying.”
You can totally understand them right, Spanish teachers?
Surprises
Now North Carolina says that Presentational Speaking is the slowest skill to develop, but you can see that it’s actually one of the skills my kids advanced most in. Maybe I’m cheating because I just adapted the AAPPL writing rubric and changed a few “writings” to “speech” or “speaking”? Maybe the speaking came at the cost of listening exposure? Or maybe my kids are smarter than North Carolina knows.
At this stage of the game, Intermediate Low counted as an A and Novice Low an F. The kids all seemed to think that was pretty fair. I toyed with the idea of using a similar scale with Spanish I next year, and I ran the idea by a few intermediates. They said that was cruel for one semester (sorry @tmsaue1). We did agree, though, that Novice Low should not be passing, so it won’t be quite the same scale as I’d originally envisioned.
