Communicating about your home
The students will assess their own and others’ progress in communicating about their homes.
Student presentations
The students are to present an interactive description of their homes. Tell them to use the sentence patterns and the vocabulary they have learnt in Unit 8 to prepare their presentations. Get them to interact in pairs. Ensure that the interaction involves asking questions and giving responses in order to request and provide information about their homes.
Set this up as a (virtual) videoconferencing session in which they role-play two friends communicating through the Internet about their homes. One person is coming to visit the other person for the first time, so they have a reason to exchange this information.
This task will allow you to assess their "free" production, that is, their creative use of language where they are using their knowledge of NZSL to make up their own descriptions from the range of sentence patterns and language they have been exposed to. The context provides an authentic purpose for communication.
Preparation and practice
Give them time to prepare and practise. Remind them of the learning outcomes for the unit. Play any of the clips, as needed, to assist them with their preparation. Discuss whether they wish to present in small groups or to the whole class.
If the students are confident enough to present to the class, then record their performances so that you can objectively review these with them afterwards.
Assessment criteria
Project the Unit 10 assessment criteria and go through each of the communication achievement objectives with the students and the measures they will use. In particular, talk about the objective "show social awareness when interacting with others" and discuss the kinds of behaviours that they will need to use to demonstrate this skill. For example, they can use such expressions such as FAR-OUT!
Student self-reflections
As they view the performances, either live or recorded, have them reflect critically on how well they have achieved the objectives.
Give them time to offer their feedback at the end of each performance, with suggestions for ways to improve. Have them evaluate their own performance by using a copy of the Unit 10 assessment criteria as well as by noting what others tell them about the skills and knowledge they need in order to improve.
Replay a scene from any of the previous units or from the three scenes used in Unit 8.
Giving your students lots of opportunities for extensive exposure to NZSL through modelling, explanation, and the use of NZSL to communicate effectively in a range of settings will develop their implicit knowledge of the language they are learning.
