Assessment 2

Tomorrow evening we'll be doing Assessment 2, the Role Play exam. The exam itself is about traffic problems and your task will be to come to a decision about how to solve the traffic problems of your town. You'll find a full description of the task on the Traffic Problems worksheet on the Assessment 2 page (in the Business Pages section of the website).

You'll get a mark out of 40 for this task, broken down like this:

Communicative Ability: 25 marks
Fluency: 10 marks
Accuracy: 5 marks

And here's the description from the How to Pass the Course page of what these actually mean:

Communicative ability is your ability to send the message you think you’re sending and to receive the messages other people think they’re sending. You also need to respond to those messages appropriately.

Fluency is the degree to which your language flows - without you losing the thread or searching too long for an appropriate word.

Accuracy covers the same factors in all three types of assessment.

Tomorrow evening I'll be largely observing what you do … but I'll intervene to help you all if your role play is getting stuck. If I do intervene (which might well *not* happen), I won't necessarily talk directly to the person who might need some help. I could just as easily manoeuvre someone else into helping them!

Just as I did with Assessment 1, I'll give you some general feedback immediately after the role play - and send you some more detailed feedback - and a mark - privately afterwards.

Good luck with Assessment 2!

See you on Kamimo at 6.30 pm CET tomorrow evening (Thursday, 3rd April).

Course Meeting 3: Making your Assessment 1 Presentation

Course Meeting 3 is next week, and this post is all about making your presentation for Assessment 1. I've just activated the 'Making a Good Presentation' page in the Course Meeting 1 section of the course web site, where you'll find some general hints and tips about how to present well in English.

These are the instructions for Assessment 1:

Assessment 1 involves making an individual presentation on an SL-related theme. 'SL-related' can be interpreted in a number of different ways:

• you might want to give a description of an interesting place you've been in Second Life;

• or you might want to discuss the whole phenomenon of virtual worlds (and people escaping into them);

• or you might want to describe specific types of interaction in SL (ever tried changing your gender and seeing how differently you're treated, for example?);

• or you might think of another angle which can still be described as 'SL-related'!

Apart from that, your presentation mustn't be longer than 5 minutes and you're allowed to use up to ONE visual aid. There are some instructions about how to upload pictures to Second Life on the 'Making a Good Presentation' page, but if you run into problems, just send your picture to me and I'll upload it for you. It 'costs' 10 Linden dollars per picture to upload pictures.

This is how you get marks for your presentation:

Presentation (10 marks) covers the various rhetorical devices and language you use to make the content of your individual presentation clear to your audience. ‘Rhetorical devices’ are things like striking examples and interesting linkages between one type of experience and another.

You are restricted to using ONE visual aid during this presentation - so that you concentrate on your language skills!

Organisation (7 marks) covers the way the different parts of your presentation hang together, and the way you’ve ordered the presentation so that it’s interesting.

Accuracy (3 marks) covers the ability to use English in a grammatically and lexically correct way.

You'll be notified of your marks separately and privately, but I'll give you an indication of how it went immediately afterwards, as well as sending a 'what you said, what you should have said' sheet to you privately.

Good luck with your presentations!

Take a look at the web site

I'm in the middle of the final preparations for Course Launch on the Oral Production course now. If you click on the title of this post, you should come straight to the course home page. A good link to click on then is the Podcasts link - I've just made the pre-course podcast outlining the details of the course. Every time there's a major event on the course, I'll make a podcast and publish a blog posting, to keep you all up to date with what's happening.

See you in world next week.

Welcome to the Oral Production Course Blog

This is the blog for the Oral Production Course at Högskolan i Kalmar in Sweden in Spring 2008. We don't actually start the course until 7th February, but I'll try to keep you posted with developments before the course starts. Then, when the course gets underway, I'll use this blog as the forum for keeping everyone in touch with each other and with developments as the course is running.

See you all soon in Second Life!