ESSAY: Basic Level Listening and Speaking Activity

Scenario: You have four students in your third-grade class who scored Basic level in Listening and Speaking after taking the AZELLA. You will be working with these students in a small group and focusing on comprehension.

Review the English Language Proficiency Standards on the Department of Education website and find the third-grade Listening and Speaking Domain standards.

Review Standard 1: Comprehension of Oral Communications and the Basic level performance indicators. Hint: There are nine Basic level performance indicators that focus on comprehension labeled B-1, B-2, etc.

Choose two performance indicators to focus on and create a 30-minute small group activity that will assess those indicators.

Specify strategies by name and use teaching strategies from the 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners textbook.

Incorporate skills and strategies that would apply to Basic level learners.

ANSWER

Basic Level Listening and Speaking Activity

            English proficiency standards for ELL (English Language Learning) students are a requirement by the federal government as established by the United States Department of Education (Dove & Honigsfeld, 2010). However, there is a difference in the implementation of these standards. Therefore, there is a need for the personalization of the framework to provide the necessary skills, knowledge, and skills, including the periodic assessment for the ELL students, which is the ELP (English Language Proficiency) standards. Ensuring a comprehensive foundation and basis of learning in the English language means outlining the goals and integrating them with the set standards of learning. In this case, the focus is on comprehension of oral communications and two basic level performance indicators labeled B-1 and B-2 in …

            To begin with, various elements combine into extensive Performance Indicators sets, which is basically a diagnostic statement set pertinent to every proficiency level and skill standard. In this case, after taking the AZELLA, the four third-grade class students scored a basic level in Listening and Speaking, and their selection to focus on comprehension will involve Standard 1. Standard 1 is all extensively about Standard English in conversation and daily life. Therefore, the first Performance Indicator statement in Standard 1 will involve the four selected students demonstrating knowledge of speech parts by adopting simple verbs with the subject-verb agreement…

            Focusing on the B1 Performance Indicator, the four students will be introduced to simple verbs, and they will use them to construct grammatically correct sentences characterized by subject-verb agreement. According to Short and Echevarria (2004), a sentence is characterized by two parts namely subject and verb. In this case, the small group activity will involve identifying the subject in a constructed sentence, deciding whether the subject is plural or singular and, lastly, deciding the specific verb form that will match with the subject (Short & Echevarria, 2004). All four students will be given six minutes each to construct a sentence that clearly demonstrates the B1 performance indicator. For example, the four students will be expected to come up with a sentence as follows: The quality of the guavas was not good. The students will be expected to identify the section of the sentence like “the quality of the guavas” to be the subject, and the “was” as the verb. Here, they must demonstrate their comprehension by explaining that since the subject, as is the case with the sentence above, is singular, it must be followed by “was” as a singular verb, and not “were.”             Additionally, the B-2 Performance Indicator will also be assessed through the small group activity involving four students. The focus will be on the conjugation of forms of the verb “to be” (presence tense). Here, the four students will be required to explore all the eight words necessary to demonstrate the various forms of “to…