A question about how to organize whole-class discussions, tasks, & activities in preparation for IPAs/performance-based assessments came up in an intermediate teaching Facebook group. I will put my thoughts here, for posterity (Facebook posts get buried fast):
In my experience with university students using performance-based assessments, the classroom experience leading up to the assessment should treat the assessment goals as a "pole" to keep coming back to, and extending from, instead of a "container" to always stay within and never stray from. Straying is good. So if my performance-based assessment requires that learners use the target language to request food in a restaurant, then we whole-class discussions like PictureTalk, PQA, Story-asking, Read & Discuss, etc. should all contain many reps of the phrases needed for the assessment. However, these whole-class discussions also contain whatever else the students find interesting that can remotely tie to the general topic of restaurants. This way, they (1) get the input reps needed to have the backward-designed patterns in their heads (phrases for requesting food in a restaurant), and (2) the whole-class discussions included language for whatever else they wanted to talk about. Over time, these non-targeted linguistic bits provide enough input-data to allow the learner to creatively talk about whatever they want on a broader range of topics.
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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