Oral Language Assessment

Jorge is an English language learner I have in a section of four-year-old kindergarten that is taught in English.  Although the main classroom teacher and I speak Spanish, group instruction is mainly delivered in English.  Jorge is the only student in his class who speaks Spanish or comes from a family who speaks Spanish.  Jorge appears to be a sequential bilingual student.  He speaks Spanish with his parents and brother each time I’ve observed them together during a drop-off or pick-up for our 4K class.  All forms and notes sent home are in Spanish, as is all communication with parents.  At the beginning of the school year, after Jorge’s parents were unable to enroll him in a bilingual section of 4K, he spoke almost no English.  From the very beginning, both his classroom teacher and I have tried to support him in Spanish, so he has come to understand that he can speak to us in Spanish and we will understand him.  While Jorge frequently speaks to the teachers in Spanish, he tries to communicate with his classmates, albeit with a limited vocabulary, in English.  I have not discerned any negative nor positive attitudes in Jorge regarding his choice to use Spanish or English, other than his greater comfort and vocabulary when using Spansih.

Although I work with him every day, this week’s assignment was a useful exercise in helping me focus more specifically on his skills in the two languages individually, and not his combined fluency and comprehension when he can rely heavily on code-switching.  In addition to using the provided K-12 CAN DO Descriptors and speaking rubric from WIDA as rubric to guide my observations, I also referenced the WIDA CAN DO Descriptors for the PreK-K grade level cluster.   It is important to note that although the rubric for the PreK-K level cluster is more specific to a four-year-old’s abilities, it can still be developmentally a year beyond a four-year-old.  Lastly, we use the Gold assessment rubric from Creative Curriculum in 4K, which is an observation based tool.  I referred back to my recent notes in Gold on Jorge to help supplement my 30 minutes of oral language observations this week for class.  Some of my analyses also come from my Gold observations, as 30 minutes goes by very quicklyJ  Hopefully, the combined rubrics will help me to provide a more accurate assessment of Jorge’s language abilities.

To assess his Spanish language, we drew and “wrote” cards to his family on Valentine’s Day.  Jorge’s oral language in Spanish seems to be much more dominant than in English.   Initially, we had not planned to recognize Valentine’s Day in class, but several students brought in treats and cards for the class.  Jorge was very eager to make cards for his family and so I adjusted my plans to observe his oral language in Spanish while he excitedly described the notes and pictures he created.   During this time I spoke only Spanish to Jorge and he responded almost exclusively in Spanish.  He described the drawing he was making for his mother in great detail—the flowers, the tree with its leaves, the sun helping the flower grow, the seeds in the ground under the flower and trees—all in Spanish.  He then started describing the colors of the flowers and that “a veces hay flores dentro de mi casa.  A mi mama le gusta las flores.”  Although he used a well developed vocabulary for a four-year-old, he did have grammatical errors such as the above “le gusta” instead of le gustan, but that is an error common among the other Spanish speaking students in our bilingual class, so perhaps it is a frequent error for beginning Spanish speakers, regardless of exposure to English.  His only use of code-switching was with numbers.  I wonder if this is familiar English vocabulary to him as we count everyday together in English as a whole class.  There was very little other evidence of linguistic blending, sementic expressions, or copying when we were only speaking in Spanish.

Jorge’s Spanish oral language in Spanish appears to be between a level 3 and level 4, using the K-12 WIDA speaking rubrics and CAN DO descriptors.  Using his Spanish he is able to use simple and expanded oral sentences, retell stories and events, and offer creative solutions to issues.  As we were making Valentine cards, we ran out of smaller paper.  Jorge offered a solution by articulating his suggestion, in Spanish, that we could open the file cabinet and cut the larger paper down to the size of the smaller paper.   

However, when I analyze Jorge’s oral language in Spanish according to the PreK-K grade level cluster rubric for speaking, which is more developmentally specific to the tasks our four and five-year-olds are completing in 4K, Jorge’s speaking is much closer to a level 4.  The table we were using to create our Valentine’s was next to a board of family photos the students have brought in.  At one point during our 15 minutes, I asked him what was happening in pictures of his family with the cake.  He proceeded to recount some of the details of his brother’s birthday that had happened over the summer.  After listening to my recording afterwards, I was surprised to realize that he did not use a single word of English during these 90 seconds.  While 90 seconds does not sound like a long time, a person can speak many words during this amount of time.  Retelling narrative stories through pictures with emerging detail is an attribute of level 4 speaking on the PreK-K CAN DO Descriptors.

Before I left on Tuesday, Jorge asked if we could make more Valentines the next day.  When I arrived Wednesday during choice time, Jorge was already at the writing center coloring in a piece of papers that had the outlines of numbers 1-10 on it.  Below is an excerpt of the transcript from the recording of this time.  Although Jorge switched into Spanish at times, I maintained my conversation with him in English.

Teacher: What are you working on today?

Jorge: Color

T: What are you coloring?

J: Letters (referring to the numbers he was coloring--this is not necessarily reflective of his English vocabulary as he may have genuinely believed he was coloring letters

T:  Who are you coloring those numbers for?

J:  For my mom. [pointing to an orange zero] Esta es naranja.

T: What number is it?

J: This naranja.

We see code-switching for naranja instead of orange in this excerpt.  Also, his answer of "This naranja" to my question of "What number is it" is reflective of what seems to a lower level of comprehensible input for Jorge when the conversation is responded to in English by the teacher.  It is not uncommon for Jorge to either not respond to a WH question in English or respond with an answer to a different WH question (e.g.  Teacher asks where the students are going and Jorge responds with a number)

At one point we overheard the other teacher in English talking to a student about eating glue sticks.  When she asked, "Is glue a food that we eat?" Jorge giggled and said "era chistoso."  When I asked him, "is it silly that the teacher was talking about eating glue?" he replied, "Si, muy chistoso" and smiled.  This brief exchange was yet another example to me that Spanish was his first and still is his primary language.  Jorge overheard a conversation on the other side of the room taking place in English, comprehended the main idea of it, and responded to it without hesitation in Spanish.

We then proceeded to work on Valentines again.

T: What are you drawing?

J: Es una flor.

T: Who is the flower for?

J: For my mom.  Es que yo quiero a mi mama mucho.

Throughout my observations of Jorge's English oral language, he seems to have trigger words or phrases.  He will insert a Spanish vocabulary word or short phrase that he either does not know or chooses not to say in English.  After this trigger word or phrase, Jorge's language often switches to almost entirely Spanish.  Also, Jorge frequently asks if he can “take water.”  This is just one example of copying that we sometimes see in Jorge’s English oral language.  I would place Jorge’s oral language in English between a level 1 and 2 using the PreK-K CAN DOs.  He is often able to answer yes/no questions about personal information, and name or identify people and objects in the classroom or in illustrated short stories (level 1 CAN DO).  He is very quick to complete phrases and chants in English but struggles with rhymes (level 2 CAN DO).  He does struggle though with asking one to two word questions (also a level 2 CAN DO). 

Throughout the year, Jorge’s English has come a long way.  He went through a silent period for most of the first quarter, where he mainly tried to engage teachers in Spanish or played solo.  In the last month, he has become much verbal in English and we are overhearing him speaking more and more English to his friends.  Today during our outside time, he stated he wanted to build a snowman.  My observations are less complete on his Spanish language development, as they are sometimes shadowed by his impressive gains in English.