testing proficiency

Wed Nov 13 15:34:09 UTC 2013

Aanii Monica (and others on the list who may be doing related work)

Here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin I am continuing what I started in Michigan with the Department of Ed and the University.  We are first revising our 3 years of curriculum to have measurable outcomes on par with all other language teaching standards.  I have 6 syllabi going through the University Curriculum Committee right now.  We are then working with a group of teachers who are in K - 12 settings, at universities and both on and off reservations to test an adaptation of the ACTFL 2012 Proficiency Standards.  Our hope is to have a website similar to what they have for Arabic so that teachers and employers can have an objective measure of proficiency.  After that, we will be designing both short term and longitudinal assessments to measure annual improvement and longer term impact of language study.

Let me know offline or as part of the group conversation whether or not there might be a benefit to comparing what all the Algonquianists teaching languages are doing.

Meg

noodin at uwm.edu
ais.uwm.edu
ojibwe.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "Monica Macaulay" <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
To: ALGONQUIANA at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 8:13:27 AM
Subject: testing proficiency

Good morning, 

I was talking to some of the people who work on Menominee language revitalization last week, and they were talking about how they need some sort of tool for testing the proficiency of their teachers. Since this is way out of my area of expertise, I said I'd ask around. Do any of you know anything about this? 

It would seem to me that any such tool would have to be specialized to work for Algonquian languages (and more specifically in this case tailored for Menominee). I mean, you would have to know whether or not to test things like conjunct order, right? 

And one further point: such an evaluation would ideally (I would think) be tied to a curriculum - another thing they're working on. But is it possible to do any kind of testing without that? 

Thanks for any leads or hints you can give me. 

- Monica 

Monica Macaulay 

Department of Linguistics 
University of Wisconsin 
1168 Van Hise Hall 
1220 Linden Drive 
Madison, WI 53706 
phone (608) 262-2292 
fax (608) 265-3193 
http://monicamacaulay.com/ 