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101586 Assignment 1: Interpreting and Critiquing Student Data

Analysis of the Students Writing Skills

This report will provide a critical analysis of an EAL/D students writing achievement

in the 2016 National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test.

This Year 5 student will be referred to as Angela in the report and the value of

NAPLAN assessment data for assessing her writing achievement will be critiqued.

Two areas of concerns will be identified from the assessment data in order to

recommend activities and formative assessment strategies that will help her improve

her narrative writing skills.

Bands Achieved for Writing

Angela achieved just past a mid Band 5 in her NAPLAN writing test. This suggests

that she has mastered the writing skills required to achieve a Band 4 and is working

towards mastering skills expected of students that have attained a Band 5. Not only

has she scored below the school average of a high Band 6 but also lower than the

national average, which is a high Band 5. Angela is within the range of achievement

for the middle 60% of Australian Year 5 students, which ranged from a high Band 4

to a high Band 6.

Description of the EAL/D Students Writing Skills

Angelas NAPLAN Marking Criteria Results
Audience Text Ideas Character Vocab. Cohesion Para. Sentence Punctuation Spelling
(0-6) Structure (0-5) & Setting (0-5) (0-4) (0-2) Structure (0-5) (0-6)
(0-4) (0-4) (0-6)
3 2 3 2 2 2 0 3 2 3

The NAPLAN writing test scores highlight Angelas ability to write a narrative that

accommodates an audience through consistency and context. She could have

further engaged and influenced an audience through the use of narrative devices.

This EAL/D students structural sophistication was affected by a weak or absent

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resolution. While her story included a beginning and a complication, a strong

resolution would have created a sense of surprise suspension for the reader.

Angelas ideas were coherent but not concise enough to suggest an underlying

theme. This may have been a consequence of her limited vocabulary, which

consisted of single words and simple figurative language and groups. Similarly, her

characterisation and setting descriptions were either brief or non-existent and her

lack of detail regarding feelings, actions, atmosphere, and place contributed to her

scores. Angela has used referring words, simple conjunctions and connectives. She

is working towards including cohesive devices in narratives to enhance the readers

experience and understanding. This EAL/D student has not organised her writing

into paragraphs, which makes it difficult to read and identify main ideas. Angelas

simple and compound sentences were predominately correct while only some

complex sentences were correct. Additionally, only some sentences were accurately

punctuated and some nouns were capitalised. With a variety of sentence beginnings,

structure, lengths, capitalisation and punctuation, she would have been able to

express clear meaning. The student was able to spell most simple and common

words and is working towards spelling them all correctly, aswell as correctly spelling

some difficult words.

Critique of NAPLAN Assessment Data

NAPLAN is a standardised test that with the purpose of determining whether

Australian students have reached key educational and academic goals. The test

presupposes that every student only communicates in Standard Australian English

(SAE), so while the assessment data may have diagnostic value, standardised
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testing is not completely effective in assessing the EAL/D students writing skills

(Johnston & Costello, 2005).

NAPLAN can be used as a diagnostics assessment to monitor an EAL/D students

academic progress from the time of the test to the time results are released. In

saying this, it may be difficult to do so, as the questions from the NAPLAN writing

test and from the classroom will vary. What it can help with, however, is to monitor

the students progress in order to introduce and offer pathways into the mainstream

curriculum (Hammond, 2012). Conversely, this may be challenging since the test

results are released just under half a year after the test date. This would make it

difficult for me, as Angelas current teacher, to use the assessment data to help

guide my lesson and curriculum planning, as this students writing skills will most

certainly change over this time period (Creagh, 2014). It has also been argued that

NAPLAN can help monitor and find patterns in the EAL/D students writing skills over

different years. However, it is difficult to accurately compare any students results

over time, as the types of questions and syllabus areas will be different. It is clear

that while the NAPLAN assessment data can be useful, the limitations heavily

outweigh the strengths.

The de-contextualised nature of the NAPLAN writing test disadvantages the EAL/D

student and does not provide an accurate assessment of her narrative writing skills.

The test requires Angela to make contextual, cultural and linguistic assumptions,

despite of her inability to do so and this contributes to the gaps between her and

students whose first language is SAE (Laguardia & Goldman, 2007; Nicholas, 2015).

Drawing in this, it can be argued that the writing test fails to target the knowledge
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and skills that are expected of an EAL/D learner, irrespective of age. The test is

highly structured and rather than social language skills, it requires students to

posses a significant depth of language (Spinelli, 2008). This has the potential to

supress Angelas communicative skills and negatively and inaccurately reflects on

her intelligence. It has been found that EAL/D learners find standardised

assessments difficult to succeed in, with one reason being not their inability to

understand the question, but the lack of language skills to answer it successfully

(Laguardia & Goldman, 2007). This suggests that the writing assessment data is

ineffective and inaccurate in assessing the EAL/D students writing achievement, as

the student may have scored much higher if they completed the same writing test in

their first language

Recommendation I: Text Structure

Given Angelas NAPLAN score of 2 out of 4 marks for text structure, this is the first

area of concern that needs further development in order for her to improve her

narrative writing skills. I will refer to the continuum mode to recommend an activity to

assist this EAL/D student in developing a familiarity with narrative text structure

(Hertzberg (2012).

I would begin by reminding students about narrative text structure and ask them to

mentally try to recognise each component while I read aloud, Where the Wild Things

Are (Sendak, 1963). Afterwards, the students and I would collaboratively identify and

discuss the characters and setting, orientation, complication and conclusion in the

text. I will give students a short narrative with the text structure components mixed

up. In pairs, students will correctly reorder these components and Angela and her
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partner will be asked to read out the narrative. I will ask the other students if they

have gotten the same or different structure and why it is or is not correct. I will then

write the structures (character and setting, complication, events that happened,

resolution and ending) on the whiteboard and have a prepared deck of cards that

state a character and setting. When students are selected, they need to select a

random card, which will provide them with the main character and setting of their

narrative. They will tell a story based on this information as they move under each

component on the whiteboard.

The text will be used as a model text to help Angela notice common text structure in

context before she attempts to reorder components that are out of context

(Hertzberg, 2012). Doing so will allow her to remember the names of these

components and their position and significance to a narrative. Asking Angela to

share her and her partners structured narrative will encourage her to explain and

discuss her reasoning and will allow me to understand her thinking. This will enable

her to recycle the language regarding text structure with her partner before she orally

tells her story to the class. While telling her story, Angela is further recycling this

language and demonstrating her ability to tell a story with correct text structure

(Hertzberg, 2012). The strategy of providing students with a main character and

setting allows the student to concentration more on the structure itself and focus her

ideas. This activity prepares Angela to progress from a spoken mode, such as in this

activity, to a written mode in future activities (Hertzberg, 2012).

The recommended activity allows me to observe and assess Angelas knowledge of

text structure during the discussion and identification of the model texts structure in
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order to compare her knowledge at the end of the activity. I am able to formatively

assess her knowledge and understanding by observing the reordered text structure

pieces. When she shares her reasoning to the class, I am able to assess her

learning by understanding her way of thinking and provide immediate feedback so

that she is aware of what she has done well and what she can improve. During her

story telling I will observe whether she has applied the feedback given to her earlier.

Furthermore, I will observe and assess if she has comprehended which text structure

component represent which part of the story. I will compare Angelas knowledge

from the beginning to the end of the activity and assess whether or not she is ready

to shift to a written mode.

Recommendation II: Character and Setting

My analysis of Angelas NAPLAN writing achievement highlighted that the second

area of concern that needs further development is character and setting, considering

her score of 2 out of 4 marks. The same text will be reused from the text structure

activity. As students will already be familiar with this text, they will concentrate more

on the task at hand than the narrative.

I would read aloud Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963). After, I would write

down descriptions used to portray the characters and setting on the whiteboard.

Students will discuss whether they think it would be difficult to imagine Max and the

Wild Things characters by only reading the narrative and not looking at the pictures

(state that there is not enough detail in this story about how the characters feel, what

they are thinking and their actions). I would then discuss whether the narrative gives

the reader enough information about time, place and atmosphere without looking at
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the pictures. Students and I will brainstorm examples of narrative devices

(adjectives, metaphors, simile) that could have given us a clearer portrayal of

character and setting. In groups, students will create and describe characters and a

setting with as much detail as possible, for the short orientation of a narrative. Each

group will need to act out the characters within the settings using the written

information provided to them by another group.

Hertzberg (2012) contends that when teaching writing skills, teachers need to shift

EAL/D students from spoken mode to written mode and this is reflected in the

activity. Angela will be involved in the verbal discussion, which will involve guided

support (Hertzberg, 2012). She will then help to deconstruction and brainstorm the

text in order to notice and recycle the different aspects necessary for creating and

maintaining these two components before writing her own. Moving to a written mode,

Angela and her group will be recasting by creating new characters and settings from

oral interactions that provide great detail (Hertzberg, 2012). Being an EAL/D learner,

she will benefit from group work, as she will be grouped with students that offer

English language models (Crawford, 2004). Dramatisation will help her to further

consolidate her learning for she will be able to create connections between the

written words and physical actions, emotions and expressions. Physically acting out

her writing will result in deeper memory retention.

Formative assessment can be implemented in various ways. During the discussions

and brainstorming, I am able to informally assess and provide immediate verbal

feedback on Angelas responses. I will observe her contribution to the written

component in order to properly assess her writing skills and provide written feedback
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on her ability to effectively portray characters and setting in detail. Subsequently, I

can see if she had applied feedback given to her earlier. The dramatisation enables

me to observe and assess Angelas understanding of narrative devices or descriptive

language and to notice if she is copying others or not.

Conclusion
In essence, NAPLAN, a standardised assessment, ineffective and inaccurately

assesses the narrative writing skills of EAL/D learners. EAL/D student, Angelas

assessment data and research reveal that the limitations of NAPLAN surpass its

strengths for assessing writing skills of these students in classrooms that are

linguistically and culturally diverse. My recommendations support formative

assessment, which enables the students and teacher to identify and work on

weaknesses and strengths and to recognise and address any problems immediately.
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References
Crawford, J. (2004). Educating English learners: Language diversity in the

classroom. Bilingual Education Serv.

Creagh, S. (2014). Naplan test data, ESL bandscales and the validity of

EAL/D teacher judgement of student performance. TESOL in Context, 24(2).

Hammond, J. (2012). Hope and challenge in The Australian Curriculum:

Implications for EAL students and their teachers. Australian Journal of

Language and Literacy, The, 35(2).

Hertzberg. M. (2012). Teaching English language learners in mainstream classes.

Marrickville Metro, Australia: Primary English Teaching Association

Johnston, P. & Costello, P. (2005). Theory and research into practice:

Principles for literacy assessment. Reading Research Quarterly 40(2).

Laguardia, A. & Goldman, P. (2007). School reform, standards testing and

English language learners. International Journal of Inclusive Education 11(2).

Nicholas, M. (2015). Student Knowledge: Curriculum, Assessment and

Reporting. The Journal of Educational Enquiry, 14(3).

Sendak, M. (1963). Where the wild things are. New York: Harper & Row.

Spinelli, C.G. (2008). Addressing the issue of cultural and linguistic diversity

and assessment: Informal evaluation measures for English language learners.

Reading and Writing Quarterly 24.