Subject Area: 7-10 Languages
Author: Isabella Petruolo, Amy Murphy, Sarah (Han Yu) Xu, Nora (Sheng Wentian)
Description
Students will be instructed to initiate a written exchange with an Italian high-school student. In this letter, they will: use typical Italian written greetings; make use of the appropriate register; introduce themselves and their families and ask questions about their pen-pal’s lives, families and interests. Students will be expected to utilise the conventions of letter-writing in Italian, formulate yes/no questions, and conjugate a variety of Italian verbs in present tense. Students should write between 6-8 sentences using a variety of vocabulary and sentence structures.
Curriculum Links
This task takes place within a Year 7 (7- 10 sequence) Italian class. This task has been designed in accordance with the Communicating and Understanding strands of the Victorian Curriculum. Within these strands the task focuses on the Socialising and Understanding Systems of Language sub-strands:
“Greeting others, introducing themselves, expressing state of health and wellbeing, appreciation and good wishes, and leave-taking, using appropriate familiar or formal language. (VCITC096)”
(VCAA, 2016)
“Understand and use key features and patterns of the Italian grammatical system, including definite and indefinite articles, gender and agreement, present tense of regular and common irregular verbs, and simple sentence construction (VCITU109)”
(VCAA, 2016)
In this task, students will have the opportunity to incorporate previous knowledge, such as greetings, in their writing. Students are required to implement knowledge from the current of unit of work by including introductions, implementation of the appropriate register and increasingly complex sentence structures. This task will build on students’ ability to express their personal identity in Italian.
Procedural Properties
| Purpose | The purpose of this assessment task is to collect data on students’ abilities to write in Italian using text-type conventions and appropriate grammatical constructions. |
| Administer | For this task, students were provided with written and verbal instructions and a rubric to chart their progress on. Students worked on the task for one 75-minute period, and were permitted to continue working independently at home. Students were allowed to access dictionaries and textbooks. Students also referred to a modelled version of the text-type, provided by the teacher in a previous lesson. Students worked mostly independently, but were encouraged to discuss their work with the teacher. The task was collected the next day by the teacher. |
| Record | The teacher recorded the marks from this assessment task as well as the feedback given to each student. |
| Interpret | Students will receive a numerical grade as well as a percentage for this assessment task. This task will be the summative assessment for this unit of work and their marks will be included on their end of year report. |
| Use | The marks from this assessment task were included on students’ semester reports. These marks will be used to provide specific, targeted feedback and learning plans for students. The teacher will use the results from this summative assessment task to reflect upon how this unit was taught and inform future teaching strategies. |
Construct
| Outstanding | At this level, students will use a range of Italian vocabulary to convey information about their personal identity in a letter. They will conjugate regular and irregular verbs in the present tense to provide detail within their letter. They choose relevant details to add to the letter and connect ideas with conjunctions to structure the letter. |
| High | At this level, students will be able to write a cohesive letter to a pen-pal introducing themselves and discussing their families through well-constructed sentences. They will conjugate regular and irregular verbs in the present tense to convey details about their daily life. They will pose questions to the recipient and maintain an appropriate register. |
| Medium | At this level, students will be able to replicate the structure of an informal letter and express their name and age and their families through simple sentence structures. |
| Low | At this level, students will be able to greet, introduce themselves and describe their families using simple Italian vocabulary. They will be able to replicate the basic structure of a letter and conjugate regular verbs in the present tense. |
Rubrics
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reliable rubrics 