What are vocabulary dialogue quizzes, and how can they enhance ITAs’ oral proficiency? A vocabulary dialogue quiz is an alternative assessment strategy that measures students’ knowledge and use of vocabulary through written dialogue scripts that they create. This vocabulary assessment tool enhances the ITAs’ oral proficiency by engaging students in conversation as they write their dialogues. It is a means to further their language development, and at the same time it fosters language awareness, especially of word form, word choice, and discourse construction. First, I would like to provide some background on how this alternative vocabulary assessment came about, and then I’ll explain how to design and implement these quizzes.

Vocabulary Objective

One of the learning objectives in the Advanced Spoken English I course for international graduate students at The Ohio State University is to enable students to speak fluently in English on a variety of topics and to draw on appropriate vocabulary and idioms to convey their meaning. A challenge facing instructors who teach this course is how to help students increase their general and academic vocabulary so that they can actively use new words and connective phrases, and how to assess students’ progress in this area. Students in this beginning spoken English course often struggle with word searching, and their common errors are associated with word form and word choice.

Content-Based Approach

As an attempt to address students’ vocabulary gaps, a new curriculum with a content-based approach was developed for this course. The textbook NorthStar: Listening and Speaking, Level 5 (Preiss, 2008) was adopted because of its content-based approach. In each unit of this textbook, students learn new vocabulary related to a central theme. For example, some of the topics addressed in the text are the Internet, personality, and feng shui. Vocabulary learning is reinforced throughout the unit by readings, listening comprehension activities, discussion activities, and a final project.

The vocabulary quizzes that accompany the teacher’s edition are fill-in-the-blank dialogues or passages with a vocabulary list. Initially, instructors used these pre-made vocabulary quizzes. However, if students’ learning goal is to actively increase and use new vocabulary, fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, and matching tasks are shallow measures of possible word knowledge (Dougherty Stahl & Bravo, 2010). So in order to enable students to have increased facility with the new vocabulary as they expressed their meaning, an alternative type of assessment strategy was needed.

Designing Vocabulary Dialogues

One of my colleagues had implemented vocabulary dialogues as a homework assignment (S. Iams, personal communication, October 10, 2012). I decided to build on his idea by having student pairs create vocabulary dialogues in class as an assessment measure. By creating a dialogue script with their peers, students can develop their fluency and metacognition as they use the new vocabulary. Additionally, this assessment strategy is more closely aligned with the pair and small-group discussion activities that students engage in throughout the unit, which provide them with practice to further develop their oral communication. Now I would like to share with you the recipe for preparing vocabulary dialogue quizzes.

The ingredients in this recipe include new vocabulary from the unit and several situations or questions that the instructor creates about the unit theme. The recipe’s instructions are to provide an outline of the vocabulary and situations to the students. Students are assigned to work in pairs. Each student pair selects one situation or question from which they will develop a written conversation. Their dialogue scripts can range from one to two pages. I would like to demonstrate how this works by using an example from the Vocabulary Dialogue Quiz for Unit 5. The topic for this unit is feng shui. The situations that I designed for this quiz were as follows:

Situations:

1. Some people say feng shui is just a superstition.
2. Can you describe a place you know with good feng shui?
3. Do you really believe that feng shui can affect people’s moods and feelings?
4. Why do you think feng shui has become so popular recently?

Students select one of these situations and write a dialogue using 20 words and phrases from a vocabulary list. Table 1 contains a partial list of the new vocabulary introduced in this unit. Students construct their dialogues with the words and phrases they have chosen from the list.

Of course, not all of the new vocabulary from the unit can be included in the word list. Kinsella (2013) presents several guidelines for selecting words. First, choose essential words that relate to the central topic or concepts of the lesson. Second, choose widely applicable academic words that students will encounter across other academic disciplines. Third, choose words from a high-frequency academic word family that students will use regularly, such as abundant/abundance and skeptic/skeptical. Finally, choose words that have multiple meanings, that is, a familiar meaning and a new academic meaning. The example that she provides for this category is wave of immigrants versus a greeting or ocean wave.

Students’ Dialogue Scripts

The final test of a recipe is tasting. So I would like to give you a taste of their dialogues. These are excerpts of the conversations that some students from my class created about feng shui for Unit 5’s Vocabulary Dialogue Quiz. Pseudonyms have been used to protect their identity. No corrections have been made to their conversations. As Jiang said in his dialogue, “There are a lot of interesting anecdotes and here is just a few examples.”

Student Pair 1

Mee-Kyong: Do you really believe that feng shui can affect people’s moods and feeling? I’m having difficulties concentrating on my work since I have moved to new working place.

Amaya: Yes, I do. I think that feng shui is very important factor affecting circulation of good chi. I’d like to help you to overcome your difficulties you have. First of all, do you have many stuffs in your office? Based on the feng shui principle, messy environment actually prevents chi from making a move properly.

Student Pair 2

Dong-Sun: In addition, if you remove the clutter in your house, you feel peppier than before. As a result, I recommend you to clean your house regularly.

Liwei: Right. The feng shui principle is about arranging the furnitures in space. And good arrangement will produce positive chi which circulate smoothly.

Student Pair 3

Gui: Hmm, I’m not exactly sure, but maybe it works. At least, it can’t hurt. For example, you can’t put mirrors in your bedroom, because when you wake up in the midnight, it will scare the heck out of you.

Bo: Actually, I also know a few principles that do work. You shouldn’t sit with your back to the door, because you may be caught off guard.

Evaluation of the Vocabulary Dialogue Quiz

Rubric scoring was used to evaluate students’ vocabulary quizzes. It was closely aligned with the rubric evaluation of their conversation tests and final interviews in this course. The point range was from zero to three for five categories.

Rubric Scoring Key

3 = Exceeds expectations
2 = Meets expectations
1 = Good effort but needs improvement
0 = Insufficient effort

The five categories were as follows:

1. Uses vocabulary accurately in sustained discourse
2. Uses mostly accurate grammar, including complex structures
3. Expresses and supports opinion
4. Expands and elaborates ideas with effective discourse strategies
5. Pronounces words and phrases in an understandable way

The last category about pronunciation was added because the Spoken English director thought it was important for students to also work on pronunciation (K. Cennamo, personal communication, January 12, 2013). She suggested that they read their dialogues aloud at the end of the quiz. Their conversations could be recorded if there was not enough class time.

In addition, I informally assessed students during the quiz. It was rewarding to hear their conversations as I walked around the classroom listening to their exchanges. I heard them negotiate word form and word choice. They also talked about which discourse connectors to use. In essence, they co-constructed their dialogues by creating a conversation through a real conversation. Buon appetito!

References

Dougherty Stahl, K. A., & Bravo, M. A. (2010). Contemporary classroom vocabulary assessment for content areas. The Reading Teacher, 63, 566–578.

Kinsella, K. (2013). Cutting to the Common Core: Making vocabulary number one. Retrieved from http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=7706

Preiss, S. (2008). NorthStar: Listening and speaking level 5 (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education ESL.

Fernanda Capraro, PhD, has most recently held a position as a senior lecturer in the Spoken English Program at The Ohio State University. Her professional interests include storytelling and vocabulary development.