Art Un ticle I.1 ited Sta In the ates News - Woodring College of ...

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Looking beyond the surface features of the students’ written responses, we next examined textprocessing patterns suggested by the nature of their answers. The transitional assessmentaddressed a number of reading comprehension skills including summarizing, identifying mainidea, and locating information in text. The items chosen for in-depth analysis, however, werethose that required more inferential responses, such as identifying character traits, notingcharacter development, determining the author’s purpose, and contrasting points of view. Asmentioned earlier, the distribution of holistic scores after the first test administration reflected thetransitional students’ processing of English text primarily at the literal level, according to thedistrict rubric. One might expect this for first year transition students, given their still-developingskills in decoding English. However, item analysis gave more specific information about whatstudents could do, what they had difficulty doing, and the conditions under which students wereable to go beyond basic, literal answers to expand on text and make connections, generalizations,and extensions.Character traitsThe early items in the assessment required students to identify traits of the main characters and toprovide text-based justifications for their choice of adjectives. By requiring textual support, theitem gave an indication of whether the adjectives used were meaningful to the students or weresimply copied from the text in a “match to sample” strategy (this strategy of lifting words fromthe text that match those in the comprehension questions has been identified as a commonapproach to comprehension test questions used by second language readers (Anderson & Roit,1996; Cole & Griffin, 1983). Three frequently occurring response patterns to this item wereidentified. In the first type of response, difficulty with text processing was evident from themismatch of adjectives and textual support. In these examples, students may have been able toidentify adjectives by lifting key words from the text but, when asked to justify their answers,were unable to do so. For example, the students might identify “stingy” as an appropriatedescription of a rich character in the story, and then fail to use textual excerpts that demonstratethat they understood the meaning of stingy and what actions proved the character deserved thatlabel.The second type of response involved the use of nonspecific adjectives coupled with appropriatetext support that would earn a 3 (adequate understanding) on the rubric. This could be the resultof difficulty with text in-depth processing, suggesting that students got only a general idea of thecharacter’s traits. However, as suggested above, the use of vague descriptors such as “nice,”“bad,” or “good” may also be a reflection of limited vocabulary rather than limited textprocessing. In describing one character, students used the vague descriptor “nice” in 20% of theresponses. However, in 90%of those cases the students provided appropriate text support thatsuggests that they did understand the basic description of the character and what evidence wasavailable to support that description. These three responses are illustrative examples of this typeof response: “Nice”: (a) he was nice because he made a home fur them; (b) because he helped thehomeless by giving them food; (c) when the señora gave her [referring to the beggar] the onionskins she humpbull [humbly]said muchas gracias.For the first two definitions, more specific adjectives that would have been appropriate include“helpful,” “generous,” or “kind,” but “nice” is not inappropriate, and the evidence given isaccurate. In the third definition, “nice” is used in the sense of “polite” and, again, the evidence isappropriate. The third definition gave the strongest suggestion of accurate text processing byindicating that students had understood the meaning of the adjectives they used and chose thesedescriptors based on the text. The examples below demonstrate a clear match between specific,© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved172
ather than generic adjectives and textual support, and would have received a 4 or 5 on therubric—“clear” or “thorough” understanding of the text. Sixty-four percent of the studentsresponded with this type of response:‣ Greedy: Quickly the rich señora threw a cloth over her plate to hide the food piled.‣ Selfish: There were plenty of meat lots of corn and tortiallas. But the rich señora did not wantto waste such fine food on a beggar.‣ Stingy: Every day poor people came to her house to beg for food and every day she sent themaway with nothing.Some differences were noted in the responses to the character trait items for two characters. Inone question students were asked to copy passages from the text that supported their adjectives,but for the other they were asked to use their own words. The match-to-sample strategy forfinding textual support would not be as effective in the latter case. Perhaps as a result of beingfreed from copying exact information from the text, students used 18different adjectives todescribe the character in the second question, including sophisticated adjectives such asconvincing, successful, powerful, intelligent, active, and considerate, but only six differentadjectives to describe the character in the first question (stingy, bad, mean, selfish, greedy, rude).This stronger use of vocabulary in the second passage may also be a reflection of the text, whichprovided much more detail about the character than the fictional piece did about its two maincharacters. This level of analysis is important in the assessment of language learners where it isoften difficult to ascertain which factors plays a role in the students’ responses.Character developmentSubsequent items required the students to expand on this basic sense of character to make morecomplex inferences. Asking students to write what the character is thinking about the things shedid in her life assessed understanding of character development. Asking students to imagine acharacter’s final thoughts as she drops into a sea of darkness required them to attribute feelings,plans, motivations, and thoughts to the character. Two general types of responses wereidentified. In the first type, students inferred that the character regretted her actions because oftheir impact on her. In the second type, students extended their understanding a bit by suggestingthat the character felt remorse for hurting other people. Both types of responses demonstrateinference and would have received scores of 3–5 on the rubric.Type 1 examples (regret):1. I tink tat she was tinking about tat she did not give food to the poor people and that she slamdthe door to the old laydy, and god puneshd her becues she did not give food to the poor peopleand she was stingy2. If I have gave that old woman more that old onion, now I should be in heaven.In these examples the students use details from the story to frame their answers, a response thatwould be considered a type of restatement of the text and thus earn a score of 3. Although thistype of response does reflect inference, it is a very basic level given the obvious result of heractions.Students who went beyond this level ascribed more complex motivations to the Rich Señora andby so doing, indicated their ability to go beyond literal thinking to, “understand connectionsamong story elements and overall meaning,” as level 4 of the rubric described, or “makeplausible interpretations or generalizations,” as characterized by the following examples.Type 2 examples (remorse):© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved173
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"Those who arrive by age 12 or 13 m
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Article I.2 Are Signed Languages "R
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Biological analyses of the status o
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and beyond, speaking and signing ch
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Conclusion: Are Signed Languages Re
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Article I.3 The Interpreter: Has a
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A few weeks earlier, I had called F
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“We struggled even getting to the
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herself by strapping a cassette rec
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In 1998, after nine years as the ch
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momentary burst of excitement that
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can shape core grammar. Because the
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The authors compared animal and hum
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monkey moved. He followed it with h
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delight, fear, laughter, and surpri
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Piipaío in a hut: Pirahã huts typ
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LEP students, and equitable organiz
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4. Second language development crea
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curriculum or "teaching to the test
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portfolio work was scanned and stor
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experiences of many groups of stude
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While not disagreeing that interpre
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sound educational practice, however
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arises from the efforts to abstract
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Article II.2 Cross-Cultural Communi
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males who can serve as positive rol
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Understanding another culture is a
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Pets and AnimalsWhich animals are v
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to teach standard English is reflec
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Asking personal questions of a pers
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Using Cross Cultural Communication
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Why Do Nonstandard English-Speaking
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Before beginning to teach standard
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• Negative attitudes toward low p
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New standardized tests and assessme
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Each of the behaviors listed above
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Article II.3 Hard Work Hypothesis:
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each point higher in SES, students
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This case does not provide strong s
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Article II.4 Language Acquisition a
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1992, p. XI). These researchers, wh
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comprehend a word within a specific
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more to the truthfulness of the chi
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This idea of “semilingualism” c
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Article III.1 A Brief Description o
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take different lengths of time to c
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example, should involve the same co
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As with all stages of BICS acquisit
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Assessment techniques at stage 3 ca
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different. Therefore, the social di
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integrative motivation. Basically,
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(Ellis, 1985; Hakuta, 1986). Howeve
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that sociocultural processes have o
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Article III.3 How Children Acquire
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phonetic units (unique to signed la
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Article III.4 Toward a Sociocultura
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emember is that the fundamental goa
Page 121 and 122: The best practices models can be th
Page 123 and 124: By focusing on the dialectic betwee
Page 125 and 126: intergenerational wisdom shared by
Page 127 and 128: Daily Realities RecappedThe above v
Page 129 and 130: traditions. At a time in our histor
Page 131 and 132: We will now look at two examples of
Page 133 and 134: Speakers communicate fluently, main
Page 135 and 136: question the effects of such attitu
Page 137 and 138: Article IV.3 Culture Change: Effect
Page 139 and 140: and psychological characteristics o
Page 141 and 142: Contraryto what wewere expecting, t
Page 143 and 144: Article V.1 Assessment in ESL & Bil
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Page 147 and 148: whether they are LEP and to provide
Page 149 and 150: Fourth, ESL and bilingual program s
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Page 153 and 154: Table 1Comparison of Recent Accultu
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Page 159 and 160: Article V.3 Assessment of English L
Page 161 and 162: 8. Change answers only for a very g
Page 163 and 164: Riles, 1979; Jose P. v Ambac, 1983)
Page 165 and 166: proficiency is often underestimated
Page 167 and 168: Finally, when second language reade
Page 169 and 170: for their decisions, noting issues
Page 171: As mentioned above, when the transi
Page 175 and 176: their imagined points of view. Ther
Page 177 and 178: English texts and demonstrate progr
Page 179: using inter-district teams). In the
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