A Heritage Speaker, a Rigid Rubric, and a Placement Decision
French 2 at a diverse urban school, 30 students. Aïcha, 15, was born in Abidjan, moved to Minnesota at nine, and speaks French and Dioula at home. She is orally fluent and confident, but her reading is below grade level in both languages and her writing shows non-standard spelling and unstable passé composé agreement. Four students in the class have IEPs, including one with severe oral-presentation anxiety. The department requires a two-minute presentational monologue, "Ma famille," scored on a common rubric: 40 percent accuracy (defined as "correct grammar and no anglicisms or non-standard forms"), 30 percent fluency, 30 percent content. Aïcha's recorded draft has rich content and natural pacing but loses points for "on a été" instead of "nous sommes allés," dropped liaisons, and one Dioula word. Your colleague says she should move to French 4; her mother emails asking for French 3. Decide.
1. Evaluate the rubric's fairness and validity for this task and propose a revision.
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The rubric conflates monolingual native norms with language proficiency, and its weights distort what the task is meant to measure. "No non-standard forms" penalizes dialect features and bilingual practice, and 40 percent accuracy rewards error avoidance over communication. For a presentational monologue, ACTFL-aligned criteria are comprehensibility, text type, vocabulary, language control, and cultural content. Aïcha's sample shows strong content, natural delivery, and comprehensible connected discourse; her dropped liaisons do not impede meaning, and "on a été" is common spoken French, not an anglicism.
Revise: 30 percent content and cultural detail; 30 percent comprehensibility and text type (sentence-level versus connected discourse); 25 percent language control, defined as features that impede or do not impede meaning; 15 percent delivery. Explicitly state that regional and register variation is not an error. Add a note that code-switching is assessed only for its effect on comprehensibility.
The revision also serves the IEP student: a delivery category can accommodate a recorded or seated presentation with the same criteria. Without this change, your scores would not distinguish Intermediate Mid from Intermediate High and would misrepresent a heritage speaker's actual profile.
2. How do you decide on placement and communicate it to the mother and colleague?
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Do not decide from one oral sample. Oral fluency overestimates overall proficiency when literacy is lagging. Gather three data points: a 10–15 minute ACTFL-style interview, a timed writing sample, and a reading inventory in French. Likely profile: Intermediate High in speaking, Intermediate Low in reading and writing. That pattern argues against French 4, where literacy demands would set her up to fail, and against a full year of French 2 content that ignores her oral strength.
Propose French 3 with a documented differentiation plan: oral tasks at Intermediate High, scaffolded literacy work (graphic organizers, sentence frames, explicit spelling and agreement instruction), and a six-week review. Heritage speakers need explicit literacy instruction, not just immersion, and they should not be positioned as the class's native informant.
Communicate with evidence, not labels: show the mother the interview and writing samples and explain what each measures. To your colleague, frame the decision around the literacy demands of French 4 and the review date. Avoid deficit language like "her French is broken"; describe her as a bilingual student with uneven academic literacy, which is normal for a student who began schooling in English at nine.