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 informally:
- 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 speak and act appropriately on a marae? Is the language that they are using accurate?
- 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 visiting a marae.
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:
- participate with a partner in a same-different task, where each student in a pair has a picture of a marae showing similar but not identical elements, and they could use te reo Māori to work out the similarities and differences
- work together on a strip-story task to put the written lines of a song in the right order while the song is being played or sung
- visit a marae and act appropriately during the visit.
In addition, the students could:
- engage in an information transfer task where they have to, for example, transpose a visual representation of the pōwhiri process into written or oral text, or vice versa
- complete a cloze task to consolidate some specific language structures, for example, by filling in missing words in the waiata shown in resource sheet 8.5.