Narrative in class: a form of assessment to evaluate students' grammar accuracy and their ability to communicate in the target language

The presentation will investigate how written and oral assessments can be created using a narrative context as a reflective tool for testing the language grammar and the oral abilities of our students. The reading of a short story as an integrated part of the language syllabus becomes a key element to activate in our students a process of noticing: through the exploration of a narrative text students are exposed to a language model which brings with itself lexicon and grammar key elements relevant for our learners. The narrative scenario contributes to motivate our students thanks to the emotional impact that narration provokes in everyone’s life. Furthermore the narrative input becomes an opportunity to be turned towards output for the students and element of evaluation for the teachers.
The presentation will define some possible activities to be used in a written assessment such as the narrative cloze and the snap shot of a scene from the story to comment. It will also look at some narrative-based tasks to be used in oral assessments: improvisation activities and spoken narrative performances through theatre techniques can be used to evaluate students’ spontaneous oral production.