Tuesday

Beginning in fall of 2010, the ESL Listening/Speaking instructors began meeting on a regular monthly basis to discuss curriculum, SLO's, assessments, assignments, and texts. It was decided that we would begin by looking at our speaking SLO's first. We had many discussions centered around how we could know if a student had reached what we would consider a minimum speaking standard that would indicate the student's readiness to move on to the next level of ESL Listening/Speaking classes. We took on the project of designing a speaking rubric for our third level L/S class, ESL 183LS. We also created a Listening/Speaking Instructors's Wiki to have a virtual home base to share our thoughts and products even when we were not able to all meet in person. This enabled us to post and comment on each other's work. As a result, we developed a speaking rubric for ESL 183LS which then became the template for the rubrics for our other Listening/Speaking levels. We also posted student speaking audio samples to guide us as we began using the rubric for student evaluations. The first year we did not complete actual student evaluations as we focused in developing the rubrics and process. The following year, we decided that we would videotape each student giving a common final presentation and use the rubric to evaluate these presentations. There were no plans to include the results in each students' final grade unless the instructor felt inclined to do so. In order to complete this project, we applied for Title III funds to purchase 5 Flip video cameras. The cameras were purchased, and a training was held to learn to use them. All of the L/S instructors videotaped their students and uploaded the videos to the Flip channel online.  The plan was that  each instructor would view all the other instructors' videos and grade them using the rubric, and then we would meet to compare our results. Unfortunately, before we were able to meet, the Flip camera was discontinued and the accompanying website shut down. We are now exploring alternative ways to view and grade student work.