I have been really concerned about my students’ ability to meet my vocabulary course’s objective. I mean, I want to be sure that students have learned to use some new academic vocabulary words. Otherwise, the class is pointless. For me, this has meant designing meaningful activities, but also it has meant creating good assessments. At the beginning of the course, I used several different methods of assessment. I had them write sentences with only the vocabulary word as a prompt. I had them read a paragraph and answer multiple choice vocabulary questions. But, I had a hard time with both of these assessments. They didn’t seem to really test all of the aspects of knowing a word and the students wanted a consistent quiz format. Maybe you have the perfect quiz format…I was still searching.

But I found the answer! I decided to change the assessment so it tested both productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge. Productive knowledge is knowledge of how to use the word. Productive knowledge was assessed with “use in a sentence” questions. Full credit was given to students who demonstrated knowledge of the words’ meaning and grammar. And let me tell you, few people got perfect scores! So I also tested their receptive knowledge or their ability to understand the words in context. I gave them questions that required students to understand target words in order to complete some writing task. For example, “Describe a traditional holiday” or “Explain the process of buying a book.” For these questions, they were not required to use the new word in the answer, but they had to be able to accurately answer the question. Together, I feel these two groups of questions give me a sense of their total understanding of the new words. Now, I know whether students had trouble understanding the words or whether they have trouble using them.

You were never supposed to see the photo to your left. It’s from a lesson that we shot in my semi-abandoned house that we decided never to use because it was “too dark.” But the plot development it inspired stayed in the English, baby! soap opera, much to Devan’s dismay.

See, when the cast arrived to film some scenes at my house–which has holes in the walls and very little furniture– we thought, “What can we do with this apocalyptic setting?” It occurred to me that Devan should be addicted to drugs. We already established her supposed propensity for substance abuse in this drunk driving lesson, and she was recently broken hearted.

So we threw a sheet on the ground and some empty bottles and did a really depressing scene where I come in to Devan’s apartment and discover that she’s sold everything for drugs.

I should say depressing in retrospect because it was actually hilarious at the time. First of all, Devan was supposed to be addicted to pot, which you can’t get addicted to. But in a lot of countries, pot a major crime so no one doe it, so we had a good laugh about people in Asia believing someone could get addicted to pot and sell all their stuff to buy it.

Second of all, Devan and I used to be roommates and I happen to know that pot treats her very poorly (like, vomiting for days) so she never ever smokes it. So it was a little inside joke for us too.

But then we got to the next cast session a month later, filmed on the streets of downtown Portland, and I told Devan we had to shoot a new scene about her being addicted to drugs. Suddenly she really didn’t want to do it! I finally convinced her that she should do it for the members because they need to know a lot of the good drug vocabulary that would come with the lesson and for me because I already had the rest of the plot build around it.

But it took four takes to get the scene we ended up using. Devan kept going silent when someone walked by because she was embarrassed. So if you see Devan around, tease her about her pot addiction for me, will ya?