Assessing progress
The students will perform role-plays so that they can be assessed on how they use NZSL creatively for a particular purpose.
Preparing for the assessment
Use the Worksheet 10.1 Assessment criteria for Unit 10 and discuss how these will be applied with your students. Decide whether you will record the role-plays and how to carry out the assessment process.
Set up groups
Divide the students into groups of equal number.
Using the invitations on Worksheet 13.3 as a model, each student prepares an invitation to a party or an outing that they can send as a text message or an email to a friend.
The student who receives the message then role-plays telling a parent about the invitation and asking for permission to go, saying who the invitation is from, what the plan is, what food is required, the time of return, and so on. Challenge the students to develop the dialogue using the language they have learned in previous units.
Practise and present
Give the students time to work on their role-plays. When they are ready, they present these to the group or to the whole class. Make sure that the other students view the performances as an appreciative audience.
Debrief
Discuss how some tasks have just a single focus, for example, matching signs and illustrations so that they can increase their vocabulary knowledge in NZSL. Then discuss how using a new language creatively in communicative situations for real exchanges of meaning is a much more complex and demanding task.
The more opportunities your students have to communicate in NZSL in a range of contexts and situations, the more they will build their confidence, knowledge, and communicative competence. This is the real point of learning another language.
