Subarea 2/Objective 5: Second-Language and Content Learning Flashcards
Apply knowledge of aural and oral language instruction and assessment for English language learners.
An ESL teacher is co-teaching in an SEI content class that includes English language learners
representing a wide range of English proficiency levels. Which of the following instructional practices would likely best promote the oral language development of all students in the class?
A. Providing students with immediate corrective feedback on their oral language production
errors.
B. Utilizing a range of question types from those that prompt a nonverbal response to those that
prompt an elaborate verbal response.
C. Using natural, rapid speech that contains reduced forms and challenging vocabulary.
D. Grouping students according to linguistic background and proficiency level for communicative
activities.
B. This class could include English language learners at the nonverbal stage of language acquisition to more advanced students whose language proficiency approaches that of their English-proficient peers. Therefore, a varied questioning strategy that allows for differentiation among learners would best promote the oral language development of all learners in the class.
A is incorrect because research shows that immediate corrective feedback may interfere with communication and, if used too frequently, can actually inhibit oral language development. C is incorrect because simplifying language forms would not be appropriately challenging input for more advanced learners, while using natural, rapid speech and high-level vocabulary would not provide comprehensible input for lessadvanced students. D is incorrect because grouping students according to language proficiency level for communicative activities is an ineffective practice, as it does not provide students with exposure to and opportunities to use new vocabulary and more complex language structures.
Middle school English language learners watch an episode of a popular television program without sound and work in small groups to create scripts of what they think the characters in the episode are saying. Then, students make audio recordings of their scripts to be played along with the video. This activity promotes the students’ communicative language competence primarily by:
A. Prompting their use of cohesive devices to communicate clearly.
B. Developing their ability to negotiate meaning in a conversation.
C. Exposing them to a variety of proficient English speakers.
D. Encouraging their oral language production in a meaningful context.
D. The teacher in the scenario sets up an open-ended problem-solving situation for students, in which they need to work together (engage in meaningful communication) to decide what the characters in the television episode might be saying and then jointly develop a script.
A is incorrect because students in this scenario are not explicitly prompted to use cohesive devices, words that help link sentences together in a discourse. B is incorrect because the students must use the soundless television episode as their stimulus, thus they need to work out meaning by relying on visual clues rather than on oral conversation. C is incorrect because the teacher has turned the sound off, and therefore the stimulus does not offer the students exposure to proficient English speakers.
Use the steps below of an informal aural language assessment administered to English language learners to answer the question that follows.
- A teacher pronounces pairs of words (e.g., thorn/torn, mother/mother, boat/both).
- Students identify whether the words are the same or different.
- The teacher presents written sentences that contain a missing word (e.g., “I want to ______
you for helping me today”). - The teacher reads each sentence, inserting a given word (e.g., thank) for the missing word.
- Students select from a choice of two words (e.g., tank/thank) which word the teacher inserted in the sentence.
This type of assessment primarily provides information about English language learners’:
A. listening comprehension.
B. grammatical competence.
C. phoneme discrimination
D. auditory processing.
C. A phoneme is the minimal unit in the sound system of a language. In English, /th/ and /t/ are distinct phonemes. In the scenario, the teacher assesses whether the students can discriminate between these sounds when the sounds are presented in isolated words and in sentences.
A is incorrect because the students’ comprehension of the meaning of the words is not being assessed.
B is incorrect because grammatical competence relates to students’ understanding of grammar, which
is not being assessed. D is also incorrect because the assessment does not evaluate how the student
processes sounds but rather focuses on the student’s ability to distinguish between words that differ by
only one phoneme.
Which of the following informal listening comprehension assessment tasks would be most
appropriate to use with an entering-level English language learner?
A. The student produces a short response to a teacher’s open-ended question about a familiar
topic.
B. The student identifies a picture that corresponds to a teacher’s aural input.
C. The student completes a short cloze exercise while listening to audio-recorded aural input.
D. The student retells a simple story after listening to the story read aloud.
B. English language learners at the entering level can typically utter only single words, phrases, or chunks of language in response to very clear, simple directives, such as one-step commands, wh- questions, or yes/no questions. They can also use pictures to communicate more complex ideas.
A, C, and D are incorrect because these activities are too challenging for a student at
the entering level of language proficiency. Understanding a teacher’s open-ended questions and providing a short response (A), filling in the blanks of a cloze activity while listening to a teacher’s input (C), and retelling a simple story after listening to a read-aloud (D) are activities that involve language
associated with higher levels of language proficiency.
An ESL teacher is planning to assess English language learners’ communicative language skills
by conducting one-on-one structured oral interviews. The teacher will use a rubric to score student responses in such areas as describing a personal experience and expressing a personal opinion. Which of the following guidelines would be most important for the teacher to follow whenadministering this type of oral language assessment?
A. Provide students with possible responses when they hesitate or fail to respond to a question
and move on quickly if a student appears unable to respond.
B. Ask questions that elicit expected responses on topics of which the teacher and student have
shared knowledge.
C. Avoid making assumptions based on knowledge of a student or on the student’s past performance and base judgments on the language produced in the interview.
D. Allow students to determine the topic and direction of the interview with limited input or
guidance from the teacher.
C. In order for the assessment to be truly accurate of a student’s communicativelanguage progress, the as sessment should not be based on past effort or classwork but rather should judge the student’s language skills by his/her performance at the time of the actual interview.
A is incorrect because the teacher should not provide possible responses, which could affect students’ responses in later parts of the interview. Also, the teacher should allow for adequate “wait time.” Research indicates that second-language learners need time for processing what they hear in addition to time for formulating a response. B is incorrect because using known topics may not provide a fair assessment of a student’s ability to communicate effectively in English across a broader spectrum of topics. D is incorrect because it emphasizes student choice in the topic and direction of the interview, whereas the interviews are described as “structured,” which implies that the teacher has carefully planned the questions so that they elicit responses that include certain language forms or functions (e.g., past tense).
An ESL teacher is selecting a formal listening comprehension assessment to use with developing-level English language learners. Each potential test requires a student to listen to aural input in an audio recording and respond to written comprehension questions. Which of the following features would be most important for the teacher to consider when selecting an assessment for this purpose for students at this level?
A. The methods by which the test is scored and results are reported.
B. The visual layout and attractiveness of the test materials.
C. The number of speakers used in the test’s aural input.
D. The linguistic difficulty of the test questions.
D. Developing-level English language learners have some technical language related to content areas but may still struggle with oral and written communication. In addition, research indicates that students perform best when a task is “just right” for them, meaning that the task is not too easy or too difficult. As a result, the teacher’s primary consideration should be the level of difficulty of
the questions.
A, B, and C are incorrect because, when selecting an assessment for a specific
purpose, administration-related features, such as how results are scored and reported (A), and surfacelevel features, such as the test’s visual layout and attractiveness (B) or the number of speakers used in the aural input (C), are not as relevant as the content of the assessment.
During a teacher read-aloud of a big book, a first-grade English language learner is able to correctly point to an illustration of a horse when he is asked the question, “Where is the horse?” However, in an oral retelling of the story after the read-aloud, he is unable to recall and producethe word horse.
Which of the following provides the best explanation for the student’s difficulty?
A. He is overrelying on picture cues to help him make meaning from the words in the story.
B. Assessment anxiety in the context of the oral retelling is hindering him from demonstrating
his knowledge of the word.
C. Phonemes in the word are difficult for him to pronounce because they do not exist in his first
language.
D. The word is in his aural receptive vocabulary but has not yet been incorporated into his oral
expressive vocabulary.
D. In the scenario, the student demonstrates that the word “horse” is part of his aural receptive vocabulary (vocabulary he is able to comprehend when presented aurally) because he correctly points to a picture of a horse when prompted. However, he is not able to generate the word independently, which indicates that the word is not yet part of his oral expressive vocabulary (vocabulary he is able to recall and generate orally). This is a common occurrence in language acquisition.
A is incorrect because the concept of overreliance on picture cues to make meaning from a text is related to the development of decoding strategies in beginning reading. Clearly, the student is not reading the text. Furthermore, his pointing to an illustration of a horse to answer a simple why question is an appropriate use of picture cues for a student who is most likely an entering-level English language learner. B is incorrect because oral retelling is generally an informal activity, so the amount of anxiety would not likely be high enough to prevent him from recalling a word, if the word were part of his active, oral expressive vocabulary. Finally, the scenario offers no clues about the phonology of the student’s first language, making C incorrect. In addition, the scenario states that the student had
difficulty recalling the word, which indicates a vocabulary issue rather than a phonology issue.
Results of a school’s intake English language proficiency (ELP) assessment indicate that a newly
arrived English language learner is at the entering level of oral language proficiency in English. According to reports from the student’s parents as well as the student’s previous school records
from the home country, the student exhibits above-average oral language proficiency in the first
language.
Given this information, which of the following approaches by the ESL teacher would
best promote this student’s oral language development in English?
A. Providing extensive opportunities for the student to develop first-language skills to strengthen
the foundation for English development.
B. Fostering the student’s interlanguage development by encouraging the student to translate
from the first language into English.
C. Facilitating transfer of skills and strategies from the student’s first language to English by
building on existing first-language skills.
D. Preventing interference from the student’s first language by asking the student to try to think
and speak only in English.
C. Language-acquisition research indicates that language-learning strategies are transferable from the first language to a new language. Since the student has above-average oral language proficiency in the first language, the teacher should take ad-vantage of this strength to promote the student’s English language development.
A is incorrect because the student already has a strong foundation in the first language. B is incorrect because developing translation skills is different than developing oral language skills in a new language. Also, encouraging interlanguage development is not considered an effective strategy for promoting second-language development. D is incorrect because asking an entering-level student to think and speak only in English is not realistic. In addition, it undervalues the role of the first language in acquiring English.
An ESL teacher observes the following dialogue between two English language learners.
Student A: You gonna use the scissor?
Student B: (smiling) OK.
Student A: I need a cut this. I can use the scissor?
Student B: (looking confused and shrugging)
Student A: That! I can have that scissor! (angrily pointing to a pair of scissors sitting on the table)
Student B: Oh. (handing the scissors to Student A)
This dialogue indicates that Student B would benefit most from oral language instruction in:
A. Using conversational repair strategies.
B. Producing comprehensible pronunciation.
C. Applying social conventions of turn-taking.
D. Understanding complex grammatical structures.
A. Conversational repair strategies involve checking for understanding by asking clarifying questions. In the scenario, Student B could not understand what Student A was asking and did not demonstrate awareness of strategies for seeking clarification. Consequently, Student A became frustrated and angry with Student B.
B is incorrect because the scenario does not indicate a pronunciation difficulty on the part of Student B. C is incorrect because the scenario provides evidence that Student B is able to take turns in a conversation, since Student B responds to each utterance made by Student A and gives adequate time for Student A to respond in turn. D is incorrect because Student A uses only simple sentence structures and verb tenses.
Use the information below to answer the two questions that follow. A middle school ESL teacher and a general education mathematics teacher co-teach a class thatincludes expanding-level English language learners. The class is working on a small-group cooperative learning project. Each group identifies a possible location for a class field trip and
then creates a trip budget and a plan for raising the money to fund the trip. At the culmination of the project, each group presents an oral proposal to the class, and each group member is responsible for presenting a portion of the proposal. The teachers want to support the English language learners’ communicative language development by promoting their active participation in group activities and discussions during the project.
Which of the following strategies would likely best address this goal?
A. Assigning each group member a role (e.g., researcher, graphics developer, scribe, treasurer)
with specific duties appropriate to his or her strengths.
B. Placing the English language learners together in a group and encouraging them to use their
first language when necessary to facilitate communication.
C. Circulating among groups and periodically grading students on their group participation to
ensure that all group members are contributing to group discussions.
D. Rotating English language learners to different groups on a regular basis to provide them with
opportunities to interact with a variety of native-English-speaking peers.
A. Assigning students at the expanding level a specific role appropriate to his or her strengths is an effective strategy for ensuring each student is an active member in the group. Students at this level have enough technical language in English to be able to participate in a discussion but may need more structure, such as in the form of an assigned role, to promote their engagement.
B is incorrect because students at the expanding level are able to adequately use academic English to participate in a group assignment such as the one in this scenario. Grouping them together would limit their exposure to more challenging language, which is important in supporting their ongoing language development. C is incorrect because it does not provide a support or structure to promote active participation of English language learners; it simply puts them in competition with their English-speaking peers for the participation grades. D is incorrect because rotating the English language learners through a variety of groups during the project would not be beneficial; rather, the students would likely feel estranged from all the groups as a result of not being a permanent member of any one group during the assigned project.
The ESL teacher video-records the project presentations and then meets individually with each
English language learner to view the recording of the student’s portion of the presentation. In addition to helping the teacher make an accurate assessment of a student’s language proficiency, this assessment strategy has which of the following benefits for English language learners?
A. Developing students’ ability to retain aural input in their short-term memory.
B. Helping students process speech at different rates of delivery.
C. Illustrating for students the importance of producing accurate grammatical forms.
D. Prompting students to self-monitor their oral language production.
D. Providing English language learners with the opportunity to see and hear themselves produce English gives them a rare opportunity to reflect on their own oral language production.
A is incorrect because simply viewing their portion of the presentation once is not likely to help them retain aural input in their short-term memory. B is incorrect because viewing their own speech will not help them process speech at different rates of delivery, since they are only reviewing their individual presentation. C is incorrect because the teacher should not use the recording to in some way reprimand or shame the students, which the strategy described in C implies.
