Assessment opportunities
To improve student learning in te reo Māori, assessment is best seen as an ongoing process that arises out of the relationship between teaching and learning – where the gathering and analysis of evidence, much of it of the moment, provides useful information on your students’ acquisition of te reo Māori. Through the gathering of such evidence, you will gain insights that will shape your practice, and your students will gain insights that will shape their learning.
In the curriculum guidelines, Te Aho Arataki, there are suggestions for possible learning and assessment activities for curriculum levels 1–2 and curriculum levels 3–4. In addition, there is helpful material collected online in Te Whakaipurangi Rauemi. This collection elaborates on some of the communicative tasks outlined in Tasks and activities, including cloze tasks, dycomm tasks, information transfer tasks, multi-choice tasks, strip stories, same-different tasks, dictocomps, listen-and-draw tasks, true-false-make it right tasks, and 4–3–2 tasks.
Ways to monitor progress, both informally and formally:
- Observe your students as they work on different communicative tasks and activities, individually, in pairs, or in groups, and assess their performance. Do they have the necessary vocabulary to communicate about the weather meaningfully? Is the language that they are using accurate? Can they ask others about the weather? Can they work with classmates to communicate about the weather? Can they convey a simple negative? Do they initiate kōrero in te reo Māori about the weather?
- Factor in to your Māori language programme formal assessment opportunities so that the students’ performance is measured by their doing tasks that are framed in authentic language learning contexts, such as communicating about the weather.
Using tasks to assess learning
You and your students could use any of the communicative language tasks described in the Tasks and activities section to assess learning. For example, the students could:
- take part in an information transfer task where they have to transpose the symbols from a weather map into written text
- listen to a dictocomp, where you read a weather report twice and they make notes and then reproduce the main points
- combine bits of information in a dycomm task to arrive at the whole picture. (For example, one student might know the weather forecast for Sunday to Wednesday and another for Thursday to Saturday. Can they negotiate meaning together to work out the weather forecast for the whole week?)
You could also get your students to participate in a 4–3–2 task, where you give them four, then three, and then two minutes (or whatever time you judge is appropriate) to practise describing a weather map.
Alternatively, you could use a recording of a weather report so that they can get the gist of the weather and discover other ways of describing the weather.