Interpreting the AAPPL Interpretive Rubric (Novice)

I have been hyperconscious of my targets since the SWCOLT presentation at  ACTFL ’14. The Benny Hill music with the moving targets really hit home what I had been asking of students with past incarnations of portfolios and learning objectives. So I’m spending extra time to make sure students see where they’re going an how to get there, providing models for them to compare to rubrics themselves.

Now they’ll have a page in their interactive notebooks of sorted examples of interpretation from their own class matched up with criteria. Here’s how.

Last week, I gave students an infograph to analyze and just pick out what they could understand as a sort of practice for IPA procedures for the interpretive phase as well as preparation for our Amiguitos project. They listed the English meaning of any words, phrases, or sentences that they thought they could understand, in addition to listing clues they used, the main idea as they understood it, and supporting details.

I made a Padlet wall of the samples for each class (I started trying to make textboxes in Word, then remembered they’re much easier to adjust on this fabulous interactive tool). I also made a SMARTboard page for easy highlighting for me and printed the PNG version for their notebooks. (Look out–you may have to weed out bullet points that mess up your careful arrangement).

I then picked out descriptors for each level from AAPPl’s interpretive reading/listening rubric to help the class classify the samples. We focused on determining novice levels 1) because this is the third week of Spanish II, for crying out loud and 2) because the amount of words strung together really isn’t what separates Novices from Intermediates, just novices from other novices. We highlighted N1 yellow, N2 orange, N3 pink, and let N4+ speak for itself.

After students highlighted multiple samples for each category, they cut out one they thought best represented each level to paste into their interactive notebooks with descriptors from the rubric.