Assessment, Differentiation, and Literacy Intervention
What this domain tests
This domain covers how you assess learning in French Immersion, differentiate instruction, and intervene when literacy lags. Expect questions on formative and summative assessment, rubric design, data-informed grouping, and intervention for students struggling with reading or writing in French or English.
Core rules and concepts
- Assessment types: formative (ongoing, feedback-oriented), summative (end-of-unit), diagnostic (before instruction). Use multiple measures: observations, running records, writing samples, oral interviews, portfolios.
- Validity in immersion: assess content knowledge separately from French language accuracy when the goal is science or math understanding. A student may know the concept but lack the vocabulary to express it. Use visuals, diagrams, and oral explanations to access understanding.
- Rubrics: analytic rubrics break performance into criteria (content, organization, language use, fluency) with descriptors. Share rubrics in advance and use student-friendly language.
- Differentiation: flexible grouping, tiered tasks, choice boards, scaffolded texts, sentence frames, and visual supports. Differentiate process, product, or content, not just quantity.
- Intervention: screen early for phonemic awareness and decoding in French; use progress monitoring; provide targeted small-group instruction; involve English Language Arts teachers to coordinate cross-language support. Response to Intervention tiers apply: universal instruction, targeted small group, intensive individual.
Worked example
A Grade 2 student reads French text accurately but cannot answer inferential questions. Data: running record shows accurate decoding; oral retell is literal only. Reasoning: decoding is not the bottleneck; comprehension and vocabulary are. Intervention: small-group work on vocabulary and question-answer relationships, using picture-supported texts and modeling of inference. Progress monitor with retells and comprehension checks. Differentiate by providing sentence starters while keeping the same text and question level.
Traps that cost marks
- Penalizing French language errors when assessing content knowledge.
- Using only summative tests and ignoring formative data.
- Differentiating by giving less work rather than scaffolded work.
- Delaying intervention until English reading also fails.
- Writing rubrics with vague descriptors ("good", "satisfactory") that cannot guide feedback.