If you’ve been through ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) or Modified Oral Proficiency Interview (MOPI) training (I have not), perhaps you can help me clarify an issue when assessing novices.
When talking to teachers about what a novice can and can’t do, I’ve heard teachers make this comment:
But that’s a question, right? And novices aren’t supposed to be able to ask questions?
That’s a misunderstanding. The major characteristics of novices is that their language is heavily supported by (if not completely) memorized language on familiar topics. A memorized question is still memorized language. After all, a novice can ask how are you? The distinction, I believe, comes when the speaker wants to dissect parts of language and reorganize them in order to create a new question. So that is the (fuzzy) line – that’s when the student is reaching into intermediate.
How about a Spanish example?
Novice Nellie has memorized the question cómo estás, but she doesn’t want to ask how you are doing, right now she wants to ask how your family is doing. So she says,
¿Cómo estás tu la familia?
Here is a question where the speaker is using memorized chunks -“cómo estás” and “la familia” – with the possessive tu in an attempt to make it your family. But these memorized chunks are a little creatively rearranged to try to create a new question.
So which is it? I’m calling it novice high. What proficiency is shown in the language in this question?
Still sussing out where level divides are, so bear with me. My understanding is that it would take multiple sentences together to begin to demonstrate Novice High. Alone, creative or not, I’d think this would be Novice Mid (N3 on the AAPPL scale).
Right, so of course we’d need a much longer sample to say if the student actually was novice high or novice mid, but I’m wondering if this were representative of the student’s production, would it be novice high or novice mid? You could be right. The student is showing support by memorized chunks “cómo estás” and “la familia,” showed the creativity to insert “tu” to negotiate “your” family but did not show the ability to disassociate “la” from “familia.” So it’s the “tu” that has me wondering novice high.
I don’t think it is that a Novice “is not supposed to be able to ask questions”…but rather you can not be ranked at any level of Intermediate WITHOUT being able to ask questions. As for the level of proficiency? You already noted that you can’t rate that small of a sample of speech. However, that sounds like something a novice mid might say, in my “not-a-professional-OPI-rater-in-any-way” opinion. 🙂
Thanks, Pam. 🙂 I do tend to overrate learners but on the other hand, we hear over and over that even advanced students can make mistakes; the issue is the pattern of mistakes. So what level of mistakes makes a novice mid instead of novice high?