Placement Test That Measures the Wrong Thing
Ms. Delgado teaches Spanish I at a suburban high school. Of her 28 third-period students, 11 speak Spanish at home; four read and write Spanish at grade level, five have had little or no formal literacy instruction in Spanish, and two arrived from Guatemala within the past 18 months. The district's placement instrument is a 50-item multiple-choice grammar test written in English (choose the correct preterite form, identify the direct object pronoun). The counselor proposes moving all 11 heritage speakers into Spanish for Heritage Speakers III, noting that 'they already know the grammar and will be bored.' Meanwhile, novices have stopped volunteering during interpersonal tasks because heritage speakers answer first, and the department's 90%-target-language policy is enforced with a 'Spanish Only' sign and lost participation points.
1. Critique the current placement procedure and propose a replacement that would sort these 11 students defensibly.
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The instrument measures metalinguistic knowledge about Spanish, in English, not the ability to use Spanish. A student who can pick the preterite form on paper may still be unable to sustain a paragraph or read a grade-level text; a student with strong home fluency but no literacy instruction may fail grammar items while reading far above the class. The test also cannot distinguish the four literate students from the five with no formal literacy, yet those two groups need opposite curricula.
A defensible replacement is a proficiency-based screening with at least three evidence sources:
- Interpersonal speaking sample (5-minute paired or interview task rated on a rubric) to separate Intermediate from Advanced performance.
- Reading comprehension in Spanish with authentic text, not translation.
- A short writing sample (8-10 sentences about a familiar topic) to surface literacy and orthography.
Placement is then by profile, not by home language. Some of the 11 belong in Heritage Speakers III; some belong in a literacy-focused heritage section; one or two may genuinely fit Spanish II. Grouping all 11 by surname is the error.
2. How would you restructure third period so that both the novices and the heritage speakers grow? Give at least three concrete moves and explain why each works.
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- Split information-gap tasks. Half the class holds one set of information, half the other, and they must negotiate meaning to complete a task. Heritage speakers get genuine communication rather than display answers; novices get scaffolded input they must process. This works because the novice's limitation is input, not intelligence, and pair structures control the input.
- Differentiated follow-up by readiness, not by label. After a shared interpretive task on the same text, novices do sentence-level reconstruction with a word bank while heritage speakers analyze register, dialect variation, or write a response in a different genre. Same text, different cognitive demand.
- Stop using heritage speakers as unpaid translators. It bores them, stigmatizes them, and removes the novice's processing time. Assign both groups roles with equal status in the task.
- Assess interpersonal performance with a rubric, and group novices together for speaking assessments so that being out-talked by a fluent peer does not depress their score.
The mechanism throughout is that heritage speakers need literacy and register work while novices need comprehensible input and protected practice time; same room, different targets.
3. Evaluate the 90% target-language policy as it is being implemented in this class. What would you keep and what would you change?
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The 90% goal is sound; the enforcement mechanism is counterproductive. A posted 'Spanish Only' sign with participation-point deductions teaches students to avoid speaking rather than to communicate, and research on negotiation of meaning shows that brief, strategic L1 use (clarifying a task, discussing a grammar contrast, a newcomer's first weeks) supports rather than undermines target-language growth.
What I would keep: the department's commitment to sustained target-language use, including by the teacher, and accountability for it.
What I would change:
- Replace punishment with comprehensible input design - visuals, gestures, sheltered vocabulary, repeated routines - so students can stay in Spanish because it is understandable, not because it is mandatory.
- Allow documented, purposeful L1 moments for task clarification and metacognitive discussion at novice levels, with the goal of shrinking them over the year.
- For the two recent arrivals, build a short newcomer support plan rather than counting their English as a violation.
- Hold heritage speakers to a register expectation - they are accountable for academic Spanish, which is a different and harder demand than 'staying in Spanish.'