There are several areas of competency that my students will build during my course, and I will evaluate each during the needs-assessment phase at the start of the session.

• Goal 1: Develop English competency by exploring narrative structure as a listener, speaker, reader and writer.
  
  This goal requires the most astute needs assessment of the four, because: the teacher’s understanding of each student’s level and experience will guide pace, grammar content, etc.; here is the heart of the linguistic content; fulfillment of the other goals is predicated on success with this first.

  Needs Assessment: Aesop’s Fable timeline activity (see below)

• Goal 2: Experience a sense of community and safety in the classroom, which is a place not only of mental stimulation but emotional reward.

Lower affective filter helps build optimal environment for learning about language and about each other as cultural individuals.

Needs Assessment: Three sets of “preference” cards for self-ranking of: competence with each of the four skills; multiple modes of learning; interpersonal study preferences. Follow-up exercises related to their choices.

• Goal 3: Dig beneath the surface of a story to discover and articulate cultural, symbolic and moral meaning.

  Analytical skills are necessary for academic pursuits, and they are also mentally rewarding in their own right.

  Needs Assessment: [This exercise is about an hour long.] After warmup activities, teacher will give students modular pieces — for example, setting, character, action, outcome — of two simple (and painstakingly selected) folk stories. Each segment will be only one or two sentences long. The students will puzzle these elements back into two separate storylines. We’ll investigate a symbol in each. Then they will swap modules of one story for another and explore the results; symbols will have been selected because they change in cultural context. I made this exercise up from scratch. I’m rather pleased with myself.

• Goal 4: To understand oneself and one’s classmates as cultural beings.

  Maximize the inherent potential (sometimes left dormant) of a multicultural environment to expand students’ view of the world.

  Needs Assessment: Simple “Who Am I” poster and discussion, scaffolded by teacher-standardized format(s) and structured prompts.

Ongoing needs assessment

• Dialog journals with weekly prompts
• Reading of and listening to stories, with verbal and/or written response
• At least one fifteen-minute student-teacher meeting before or after class
• Individual or pair presentation about a legend from students’ own culture

Aesop’s Fable Timeline: First Needs-Assessment Activity

Designed To Assess

• Students’ level of listening, speaking, reading and writing in English
• Students’ level of comfort with each area
• Students’ lexical competence

Process

Teacher writes a simple story timeline on the board: setting, character(s), action, challenge, outcome, lesson. We discuss it for comprehension, examples, etc.

Students individually:

• Listen as teacher tells (not reads) an Aesop’s fable.
• Listen again, jotting down words they don’t understand.
• Read the story on an illustrated handout.
• Refer to the story timeline on the board: Identify the characters, the setting, etc.
• In small groups, discuss their discoveries about the storyline.
• As a class, explore the moral: have they had a similar experience in their life?
• Write: what part of that exercise did you like the most (or what was easiest)? What did you like the least (or what was hardest)? What was your favorite part of the story?
• Get homework assignment: to make their first entry in their language journals about what they hope this class will help them achieve, or similar question framed by clear prompts.

Through observation during the class and analysis of students’ writing, teacher will be able to learn the following about each student:

• How comfortable they are with speaking English in front of classmates.
• How effectively they are able to understand instructions.
• How comfortable they seem with asking each other for help and working in small groups.
• Their ability to find the main theme in a simple, concrete story and relate it to their own and/or others’ experience.
• Their functional vocabulary.
• Their writing skill.
• Their hopes and expectations for the class.

Investigation 6.5 from Graves p. 114

• What information does it gather?

It gives a glimpse into students’ level of speaking, listening, writing and reading skill. It also sheds light on their cognitive ability to analyze a text, and their ability or willingness to make ties between “other” and their own lives. It also shows how comfortable each student is in various work settings: individual, small group and whole class, and reveals something about their vocabulary.

• Who is involved and why?

I’m not sure I understand this question. Each student is involved, both as an individual and as a member of a larger group. The teacher is involved as a director, guide and source of reassurance. Other stakeholders are not involved.

• What skills are necessary to carry it out? Is preparation needed? In other words, are students familiar with this type of activity or do they be to be taught how to do it?

The activities are solidly scaffolded, so whether or not students are familiar with the idea of analyzing a story’s structure, they will be able do it. Part of the objective is to measure their previous experience with this sort of academic thinking, but to do it in a way that doesn’t exclude those without that educational foundation. The activity does require teacher explanation and modeling, but I will use a very simple story (in terms both of language and structure) and provide adequate support.

• Is the activity feasible given the level and number of your students? How could you adapt it?

Yes, I believe it’s feasible. The students will be at the community college level so cognitively they should be able to handle it. However, there is likely to be tremendous range within that context. I could adapt it by breaking the exercises into smaller (or bigger) steps. Or I could model the exercise first with the whole class and then give them a new story to explore on their own. If there seems to be a wide variety in competence, I could offer them two stories — one simple, one more complex — and let them choose one. Then they could work in groups by story. (Since both would be Aesop’s fables, differing most obviously in topic, it wouldn’t stigmatize people choosing the “easier” story. I could also adjust small-group size depending on number of students in the class.

• Is the activity focused only on gathering information which you will analyze, or does it also ask students to:

• Identify problems and solutions?

It asks students to think creatively, and to find meaning in the story that ties to their own experience. It doesn’t ask students to think of language-related problems and solutions, but that’s an interesting thought. Perhaps at the end of class, or in their language journals, they can write about one thing that was easy for them in that exercise, and one thing that was hard. I like that. You know what? I’m going to change my exercise right now. Okay: done. What you’ve just read in the previous pages now reflects that change.

• Identify priorities?

This exercise I detailed doesn’t, but another mentioned above does: the one in which students rank the four skills from easy to difficult. That will help inform my priorities.

• How will the teacher and learner use this information?

The teacher will emerge with a window into the English-language competence of the students, their experience with cognitive processing of a text, and a glimpse into their personal life, their level of confidence and their comfort in working with a group. By examining this material, the teacher can get a sense of the varying learning styles, competencies and experience of each student. The teacher will adapt lesson plans in light of how homogenous or diverse is the group.

Students will use this information to evaluate where they are in their language-learning journey, their strengths and weakness, and where they want to be by the end of the class.