Blog discussion(s) for Feb 11

Okay, so the University is closing at 3pm today, so all afternoon and evening classes are canceled. I'm still posting the activities I told you about, but you can choose for yourself whether or not to use them.

After completing your activity, start a new post that describes it. If you want to link to a site, feel free to do so, or if you create a document that you want to share, the easiest thing to do is post it to googledocs and then link to it there.

Activity #1: Look online for any formal reading assessment that you can find. Evaluate it based on reliability, validity, and practicality.

Activity #2: Google around for some informal reading assessments. Create a list of possibilities, and then discuss the one that you think would be most effective, and/or the one that you think would be least effective.

Activity #3: One possible way to boost retention could be for students to have measures of progress that show them that their English is improving. One example of this is the Speed Reading Graph that Nation discusses. Can you find comparable measures of progress for speaking, listening, writing, and reading (not just speed reading)? What might these include? How effective do you think they would be in illustrating to students that their proficiency is improving?

Activity #4: Look in Nation page 80 (or on Nation's webpage) at the bilingual vocabulary tests, and think about them in terms of effectiveness in a classroom. What do you think of these? Would you use them? HOW would you use them? In what ways are they effective measures of vocabulary? Ineffective measures of vocabulary? What advantages or disadvantages do these tests have?

Activity #5: Find a reading online that has comprehension questions that go along with it. Then have 5 native speakers of English try to answer the questions without doing the reading. What does it tell you about the validity of these questions? How might you change the questions to make them more valid?

Activity #6 (sorry, couldn't stop at 5!): Nation notes that in order to be valid, comprehension questions should "measure reasonable comprehension" and not things that "a proficient native speaker would not remember from the text" (page 89). Look for a set of comprehension questions that you think have a low level of validity due to this. Comment on what kinds of things are asked and why they are inappropriate.