Developing a Speaking Diagnostic Tool for Teachers to Differentiate Instruction for Young Learners of Chinese

Abstract

Chinese language (CL) education in Singapore is encountering increasing challenges as a possible result of the familial language shift from Chinese toward English in the last few decades. One such challenge is the diversity of students’ level of Chinese proficiency. To address this challenge, the Singapore Ministry of Education recommended that CL teachers make instructional differentiation based on good knowledge about students’ Chinese proficiency levels and different developmental trajectories. It was against such a background that the package of Chinese language Oral Proficiency Diagnostic Tool (OPDT) was developed by the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language for Primary 1 (Grade 1) CL teachers in Singapore. The OPDT was comprised of the Chinese Oral Proficiency Diagnostic Rubrics, the Diagnostic Activity Package, and the Differentiated Instruction Activity Package that aimed to assist CL teachers to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of Primary 1 students’ Chinese oral proficiency, to engage students in using Chinese so that teachers could have adequate student output for diagnosis purposes, and to enable teachers to differentiate their instruction with reference to the result of their diagnosis. This chapter reports on our development of the OPDT, its key features, and our effort to validate it as a useful tool for CL teachers. We hope the Singapore experience would shed light on Chinese as a second language education in other contexts and informs classroom-based formative assessment, instruction, as well as professional learning of CL teachers.