Wall Street Core Course, Oral Placement Test, Teacher’s Notes

Overview
The Oral Placement Test has been created to work in conjunction with the Online Placement Test, and in some
cases, instead of the Online Placement Test, in order to place students in an appropriate starting level for the Core
Course.
The Oral Placement Test includes 5-6 prompts per level from Levels 1–20. Each prompt includes a question(s), which
have been designed around relevant learning objectives from the Pearson Syllabus. These prompts are followed by
guidance on what kind of response would be ‘strong’, ‘adequate’ or ‘limited’. Again, these rubrics have been
mapped to the Global Scale of English and include recommendations about the level of the student.

Purpose
The purpose of the Oral Placement Test is to provide teachers with a tool to help place students in the appropriate
level for the Core Course. It has been created with the following three scenarios in mind:
1) The online test is unavailable.
2) The online test has provided the teacher/student/consultant with an unexpected result.
3) After a few lessons, the teacher/student/consultant believes the initial placement was incorrect.

Process
In order to conduct the Oral Placement Test, you will first need access to the Online Placement Test result. If no
result is possible, you will need to make a judgement on their approximate level based on other sources (eg a recent
IELTS test result or a previous course they’ve taken).

Once you have decided on a level, you should then choose the first prompt from the level below the original level.
For example, if the result of the Online Placement Test was Level 5, you should start with the prompt ‘Can you tell
me how you get to work/school each day, please?’ from Level 4. The only exception to this is that if the result of the
Online Placement Test was Level 1. In this case, you would start at Level 1.

Once the student responds, you should review the rubrics to help you decide whether the student’s response was
‘strong’, ‘adequate’ or ‘limited’. If it was ‘strong’, then you should move up a level for the next question. If it was
‘adequate’, you should go to the next prompt at the same level. If it was ‘limited’, you should go down a level for the
next question. So for example, if you had asked the first question in Level 4 and the response was ‘strong’, you
would then move to the first prompt in Level 5: ‘Can you tell me what kind of restaurants are near here/where you
live?’. If it was an ‘adequate’ response, you would then move to item 4.2 in Level 4: ‘Can you tell me what you do in
the morning, please?’ and if it was a ‘limited’ response, you would move to item 3.1 in Level 3: ‘Can you tell me
about the weather today/yesterday, please?’.

You should continue this process until you get an ‘adequate’ response from the same level 2-3 times in a row. If
you’ve started with an Online Placement Test result, it should only take approximately six prompts to get to a final
result. It may take longer if you’ve had to make a judgement call on the starting point.

Sample script
T: Good morning / afternoon / evening. My name is … and I’m going to ask you some questions. If at any time you
don’t understand or need something repeated, let me know. Are you ready to begin?

S: Yes/No.
T: Ok, let’s start.

[Questions from the Oral Placement Test….]

T: Ok, that’s the end. Thank you.