➡️Receive completed Student Placement Document from Assessment Proctor
- This should include the reading, raw score and placement level, the listening raw score and level, the speaking level. So the five numbers should be there as well as all four numbers for their self-assessment.
Place them using these placement guidelines : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YSeuXnmqsNWWmRPo4oYdo227WnFk2EgWdHV2TTuFkRI/edit
Student Placement Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LW6u0OSth6VmzG62fjM2EcVvpvbDKUGU/edit
➡️Regularly Pray
- that students will take ownership of their learning
- will get placed in the best small group (ESL class) for them
- will feel at home and stick around
➡️Ownership coaching
Counsel / Coach them on why we are placing them in a certain class level.
- Connect with them
- Why we do variety of assessments
- Start with their assessment
- Explain our results
- Ask them what they think is difference between coach vs. teacher. Explain. therefore…
- goals
- Discuss with teacher
- Address if does not feel right or productive
- Encourage feedback from students on their learning progress
Coach them on why we are placing them in a certain class level
- Some may need encouragement that their skill levels are stronger than they think.
- Sometimes they are overconfident (e.g. “I should be in the next level up”). This may be because they assume their job or education level means they are also skilled at English. Or they may be self-assessing based on their comprehension skills (reading / listening) rather than their production skills (speaking / writing). In this case, it may help for you to show the data (e.g. assessment results) behind the decision, and to explain that class placement is not only for their benefit, but that poor class placement hurts other students and the teachers as well.
Help them stick with us in ESL classes by coaching them / managing their expectations. This is one of the few opportunities we have to do this. May need to use Google Translate.
- Student attrition is a huge problem in most ESL programs
- One cause for this is that learning a language is hard.
- Another cause is that students misunderstand their role… they think it’s the teacher’s responsibility to “fix” their language problem. Or they may think that language acquisition is just about memorizing grammar charts or other classroom-centered or teacher-centered misconceptions. Many countries actually promote this outdated model that is disproved by research. However, it may have strong cultural moorings and may take work to undo.
➡️Relational integration.
Help them find classroom
- Better than just handing them a map, especially on their first day.)
Help them feel welcomed
- If at all possible, Introduce them to the volunteers & students in their new class. This is important because students do not always know who the volunteers are.
Do what you can to help them understand this is not about data transfer.
- Here are some suggested topics:
- their role / responsibility
- teacher’s role / responsibility
- importance of goals
- importance of feedback / communication with teacher (e.g. if it seems too hard or too easy)
- that progressing through the book is not the same as learning the language