Assessment Results of Mandarin for Students of Chinese Heritage II
(LC 122)
Wei Lai
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
May 31,2013
I.
Student learning outcomes
One of the expected student outcomes listed on LC 122 course outline is that, upon
successful completion of this course, the students will be able to “accomplish basic
communicative tasks, such as being able to express one’s needs in simple
conversations in a variety of real-life situations (at a doctor’s office, etc.) and write
texts on the before-mentioned familiar topics”.
The general education objective is upon completing the course, students will be able
to “communicate effectively through reading, writing, listening and speaking”.
II.
Assignment
On their finals, the students were requested to write a well-organized composition
about their school life and/or the environments they study and live in. The
composition had to be at least 100 Chinese words, and they could write it in Pinyin
(the phonetic transcription of Mandarin Chinese) or in Chinese characters. In this
composition, the students had to demonstrate that they had the ability to use the
vocabulary and sentence patterns they had learned throughout the semester.
III.
Grading Rubrics
The rubrics below were employed to evaluate the students’ writing skills. Their
writing skills were assessed by the accuracy (i.e. “task completion” in the rubrics),
grammar (i.e. vocab and grammar), and cohesion (i.e. “level of discourse”) of their
writing sample. A total score of 15-16 points is categorized as “performance exceeds
expectations”; 13-14.5 points as “meets expectations”, 10-12.5 points as “almost
meets expectations” and 0-9.5 points as “does not meet expectations”.
Task
Completion
Level of
Discourse
1
Vocab.
Grammar
Superior
completion
expectations of the task.
Student
fully addresses the
information
requested, and
provides
additional details
Exceeds
4 POINTS
Student fully
addresses the
expectations information
provided, but does
not provide
additional details
Meets
Sentences are
fully
developed and
interconnected
with cohesive
devices
appropriate for
this
level
Rich use of
vocabulary
4 POINTS
4 POINTS
4 POINTS
Sentences are
fully
developed.
Cohesive
devices are
sporadically
used.
Adequate and
accurate use of
vocabulary
3 POINTS
3 POINTS
3 POINTS
Partial completion
Almost
of
meets
expectations task. Student
completes no more
than 60% of the
information
requested
Sentences are
somewhat
complete.
Rare use of
cohesive
devices
Somewhat
inadequate
and/or
inaccurate use
of vocabulary
2 POINTS
2 POINTS
2 POINTS
Minimal
Does not
completion
meet
expectations of task. Student
completes less
than
40% of the
information
requested.
Perfect control
of the syntactic
structures
required.
(Accuracy
level 90% 100%)
Sentences are
mostly
incomplete. No
use of cohesive
devices
Inadequate
and/or
inaccurate use
of vocabulary
1 POINT
1 POINT
Adequate
control of
the syntactic
structures.
Some
grammatical
errors
(Accuracy level
79%- 89%)
3 POINTS
Emerging
control of the
syntactic
structures
Several
grammatical
errors
(Accuracy level
61% - 78%)
2 POINTS
Minimal
control of
the syntactic
structures.
Numerous
grammatical
errors
(Accuracy level
0%- 60%)
1 POINT
1 POINT
2
IV.
Summary and analysis of the assessment results
Since this is a secondary language course at elementary level, it is expected that at
least 70% of the students can perform above “almost meets expectations”, in other
words, score above 10 points.
Summary:
The lowest score in this class is 12 points, but still above the 10 points cut-off line. In
other words, all class performed above “almost meets expectations”. The average
score of the class is 15 points. A chart indicating breakdown of the average scores is
given below:
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3.9
3.8
3.7
3.6
3.5
3.4
Task Completion
Level of Discourse
Grammar
vocabulary
Chart 1: Score breakdown of the writing assignment
Analysis:
In Chart I, it can be told that in average, the students scored highest in the section of
task completion, and the second highest is level of discourse. Since this class was a
heritage class, most of the students had no difficulty in understanding the task and
completing the task in the target language. Their fluency in speaking Mandarin was
reflected in the sections of task completion and level of discourse.
However, they did not perform equally well in the sections of grammar and
vocabulary although their performance still met the expectation in these two sections.
Since most of students only spoke the language but started to learn to read and write
Chinese in the preceding course (Elementary Chinese I for heritage speakers), they
might not be able to distinguish between oral speech and written speech. Additionally,
some students’ vocabulary was limited to words used in daily conversations and
needed to be expanded.
V.
Discussion and future plans
Overall the assessment results are satisfactory. The compositions evidenced that the
students were able to construct, organize a written discourse about their school life
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using appropriate vocabulary and grammar. The conclusion is in line with the learning
outcome that students can accomplish basic communicative tasks ideas and
communicate effectively through writing.
According to the assessment results, future plan should focus on enhancing students
ability in building and using more sophisticated vocabulary. To reach this end, more
writing practices such as fill-in-the-blank (cloze test), short essay writing and
translation, can be considered. It is also suggested that more writing exercise can be
included in tutorial sessions.
VI.
Appendix:
An example of a perfect score composition is translated in English as follows. In this
well-organized composition, the student exhibited his excellent command of using the
vocabulary and sentential patterns he had learned from this semester. However, it is
hard to truthfully translate the tone and word choice in the original composition.
I am very happy and cheerful today. The reasons are that today’s weather is
very nice and I got 99/100 on my Chinese lesson test. I attribute my high
score to my practice and hardworking. Dad and mom must be even happier
than I am. They probably have no idea that I am so good at Chinese and can
score so high on the test. When I am home, I like to go online.
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