Course Meeting 4: Assessment 2 (Role Play Exam)

This time there were only five students - but quite a few visitors from various places, including Högskolan i Jönköping, where a couple of students are doing a project about SL. I'd received apologies for absence from the rest, and we'll have to organise another session for people who missed the Role Play Exam.

There was a bit of technical trouble for one of the students right at the beginning, which is why it was a good idea to start with Outrageous Opinions. By the time we'd got to the end of the exercise he'd fixed his problem with feedback from his mike.

I'd already posted the Role Play Background document on the course web site (and mailed the students about it), but I'd created some visual aids showing the details of the positions of the different characters in the role play, and I went through these in some detail in Peer Gynt first, so that the students could start creating their own mental pictures of what was going to happen. I also took them through the assessment procedure - this is also a way of focussing the students on the task in hand.

The technique I used is one which I've adapted (stolen!) from the RSA CoCom exam (that is, the Royal Society of Arts Communicative Competence Examination). There's an intrinsic problem in examining people's ability to speak English. Set-piece presentations which students can prepare are one important element, but another equally important one is the student's ability to converse in freer, less-structured and less-controlled situations, where spontaneous elements may occur, and which need to be dealt with.

I've been examining spoken English via role play examinations for quite a long time now. I must have participated in the examination of about 2000 students at the Army Technical School in Östersund over a 10-year period (role play and simulation are important elements in military training all over the world). However, during this period, we used the 'standard' CoCom procedure, with a facilitator who participates in the role play itself (hopefully as a silent partner, but also to facilitate the performance of the weaker students in particular) and an examiner who sits outside the role play and observes what goes on.

After the role play the procedure is for the examiner and the facilitator to compare notes, often with the examiner looking at both the 'big picture' (i.e. how the role play went in general) and the fine details (such as grammatical errors), whilst the facilitator reports back on more affective aspects, such as facial expression and tone of voice.

This time around, though, we don't have the resources for both a facilitator and an examiner, and I realised - on the hoof - that there was a minor design fault in the activity: the role of Council Officer was really one for a facilitator, rather than a student … so I made myself into the Council Officer and used my role to facilitate.

There were also problems with the number of students. There are four roles in the role play, but the idea is to be able to ditch one of them, if necessary. This time around it was necessary, so we had a role play with 3 students + facilitator and another with 2 students + facilitator. I asked the students to decide which role they wanted to play before we began dividing them into groups, so that I was able to put together viable groups which consisted of people who'd chosen their function within the group … so it worked well.

Then the students got 10 minutes to go away and prepare (but bear in mind that the preparation lacked one important feature, namely the inputs I would make as facilitator). Then we met up in Yggdrasil and got down to it.

The group of 3 + 1 worked better, in my opinion, than the group of 2 + 1, despite the fact that the latter were probably stronger students when it comes to the ability to speak English … However, everyone did well, with everyone getting between 70% and 80% of the available marks.

I ended the session with a briefing about Assessment 3 (about which more in another post), and the students from Jönköping distributed a questionnaire.

After the session I wrote up my assessment notes and mailed each student with their result, and circulated a mailing list for people to use to choose their partners for Assessment 3. I'll make the podcast later on this morning …