Yokohama International School English Department

A guide to the middle school English courses

How do we assess the middle school students?

As in the Languages, Science and Mathematics Departments, YIS middle school students
are assessed by a letter grade A-D and F. The four departments, English, Science,
Languages and Mathematics, report these grades at the end of semester 1 in January and
the end of semester 2 in May. Students will complete between 4 and 6 major assessment
tasks each semester, and the students will bring these home for you to look at, discuss,
and add comments to if you wish. Please sign these sheets so we know you have seen
them. The students keep these assignments in a portfolio which follows them through
middle school.

How are the departmental assessment criteria used?

In middle school English classes, we encourage the students to refer to the relevant
criteria whenever they are working on an assignment. Indeed, we create individual
assessment sheets for each major task. To help the students focus on the different skill
areas, we create questions for them to consider as they are working. For example, for a
recent grade 6 creative writing project the questions were:

Criterion A Criterion B Criterion C

Ideas Structures Style and Language
Questions to help you Questions to help you Questions to help you

How entertaining and How well did I plan and How accurate was my
imaginative were my structure my piece of spelling, punctuation and use
ideas? writing? of tenses?

How effective was my use How varied and effective was

of sentences, paragraphs my use of language?
and dialogue (if used)?

There are ten levels for each criteria and the students assess themselves and sometimes
peer assess before the teacher adds his or her levels and comments. We then send the
sheets home with the assignments to be signed by parents. These pieces are collated by
the student, creating a portfolio of their work that they can to refer to.

Self and peer assessment

In order to ensure the emphasis is always on the students improving their skills and
reflecting on their understanding, they assess their own work and sometimes get
feedback from classmates. This process helps the students to use the criteria and
consider the real effectiveness of their work.

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How do we create a letter grade from this information?

We prefer the students to focus on the individual skill areas as much as possible, which
is why we sometimes leave the letter grade off assignments, but we do use grade
boundaries to create YIS letter grades. These are:

A 25-30 B- 17-18 D+ 9-10

A- 23-24 C+ 15-16 D 7-8
B+ 21-22 C 13-14 F 0-6
B 19-20 C- 11-12

This is the same for all middle school students in English, but the degree of difficulty of
the tasks, texts and levels of competence expected increases as the students progress
through middle school. If you want to get an idea of a letter grade when you receive an
assessed assignment, you can use these boundaries as a guide.

When deciding the semester grades, as well as looking at the graded assignments, we
also take into consideration the students’ skill levels in day-to-day class work. Our aim
is for the assessment levels to reflect, as accurately as they can, the true ability of each
individual student at these stages in their development.

What types of assessment tasks do the students complete?

In order to give the students the chance to demonstrate real understanding of content
and skills, they complete a range of assessments, both formative and summative, over
the course of a year. These may take the familiar form of essays written in class or at
home, or the mandatory end of year examination that normally focuses on
comprehension and literary analysis skills. However, assessment can also include a
range of interpretative, expressive and creative tasks in the form of artifacts like posters,
magazine articles, short-films, comic strips, transformations of stories, diaries or
imagined responses to fictional contexts.

If the students are making an artifact in a group, they often have to submit an associated
piece of writing they complete on their own to help us evaluate their individual
understanding. Sometimes we are looking for students to show understanding in new
contexts, one of the reasons we vary the format and composition of our units of study
and associated assessment tasks.

How can parents help students improve in English?

You can:

• encourage and help the students to review their work, using the questions from the
assessment sheets as a guide (this is most effective when the student is creating the
assignment)

• be an audience for any of their written or oral pieces before they are due, and give
them feedback on how it could be improved and, as much as possible, highlight
mistakes and have the students correct them themselves

• encourage the students to write rules, new vocabulary and correct spellings in their
language books

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• use the ‘Literacy Objectives’ books the students all have as a reference for language
issues and advice

Language skills

Our approach to teaching language and grammar is integrated into the units of study
that the students follow. Language skills are developed through a variety of activities
including whole class directed teaching, differentiated small group work, one-to-one
tuition and peer teaching. Students are also taught proof reading and editing skills, and
are encouraged to use their own language books to support the development of their
ability to communicate accurately and effectively.

Technology and Media Education

Students use technology regularly as part of their studies in the English department and
each middle school course includes at least one major IT task. Recent projects have
included desktop publishing, film-making and creating web-pages. These tasks always
support core English literacy and literary skills as well as encouraging the effective use
of technology.

Our approach to these projects aims at enabling the students to be self-reliant and
knowledgeable users of technology and web-based information. These tasks also
specifically target problem solving, time-management and collaborative skills.

Website information, homework and communication

Our course outlines are available on the public part of the website and we have
developed the English portal pages to give us the facility to upload the task and
assessment sheets for all the major tasks in middle school English. These will be posted
on the class websites with the dates they are due to be completed.

Grade 6 students should receive approximately 60 minutes of homework a week and

grade 7 and 8 around 90 minutes of homework. Teachers may set a wide variety of tasks
to be completed at home, including reading, answering and creating questions, editing,
researching and writing.

To encourage student independence and self-reliance students use the YIS homework
diary to record homework tasks, projects, deadlines and organize themselves generally,
please support them in using this tool as effectively as possible.

Personal reading and library skills, author’s visits

Developing and sustaining a love of reading is a key part of our programme. To support
this, the students do some silent reading in class, discuss their reading choices with their
teachers, and are developing their own reading and viewing blogs to share and practice
writing about literature.

In conjunction with the library and readathon, we organize author’s visits and reading
weeks. Award-winning writers like David Almond, Micheal Coleman and Donna-Jo
Napoli have visited us in recent years, visiting classes to read from, and talk about, their
work.

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Middle School Texts

Below are examples of the texts that have been used in recent years, these are subject to
change.

Grade 6 Grade 7 Grade 8

‘Hatchet’ by Gary Paulsen
‘Boy’ by Roald Dahl
‘Axed Between the Ears’
poetry selection
‘The Midwife’s Apprentice’
by Karen Kushman
The poetry of Rodger
McGough
Greek mythology
‘Daydreamer’ by Ian
McEwan
‘The House on Mango
Street’ by Sandra Cisneros
‘The Flood’ by Charles
Causley
‘Two Weeks With the
Queen’ by Morris
Gleitzman, adapted by
Mary Morris
‘Journey to Jo'burg’ by
Beverley Naidoo
A selection of ballads
‘Of Mice and Men’ by John
Steinbeck
‘Skellig’ by David Almond
‘Macbeth’ by William
Shakespeare (original and
adapted versions)
‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’ by William
Shakespeare
Selection of short stories
The poetry of William
Blake

Roman mythology

Teachers

Teachers Grade levels E-mail address

Susie Clifford 6 and 7 cliffords@yis.ac.jp
Colin Campbell 6,7 and 8 campbellc@yis.ac.jp
Kathleen De Vries 7 devriesk@yis.ac.jp
Trevor Kew 8 kewt@yis.ac.jp
Dan Cowan 8 cowand@yis.ac.jp