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Begin with Lisa Shepard’s site as she has paved the way for how to use IPA assessments with beginning students on themes such as Ce que j’aime, La Famille and Le Petit Déjeuner. Her work is ambitious but not only because she can write IPAs for beginning students. What can be learned from her goes deeper. Shepard is striving to move away from giving an over-riding theme to the IPA to creating a context for the IPA, i.e. a real-world reason for language students to engage in the task. In Shepard’s Intermediate IPA on the environment, where the reading and the video is about what French students are doing for the environment, Shepard managed to enter her language students into the context by giving them the role of an exchange student going to the school where the initial students were interviewed. As a result of reading Shepard’s examples, when I write an IPA I am more intentional about context.

Continue with Cécile Lainé’s site, looking at her IPAs on free time, immigration, food, activities, family and school. And for more by Lainé and her colleagues, refer to the Ohio Foreign Language Association Site, especially the sample found here on Neighborhood. Lainé was my original go-to person as there is a huge lesson to be learned from both how she integrates the three components of an IPA as well as how she encourages truly spontaneous speech in the Interpersonal Tasks. When I write my own, I look at her language to guide me. Regarding integration, Lainé uses one task to inform the next, for example, in the Le temps libre IPA students learn about the free time activities that young French people prefer by reading the results of a survey, then use the same vocabulary to talk about their own leisure activities. It doesn’t stop there. Next the students use what they read about and what they discussed as material to do a presentation on leisure activities, comparing leisure for French and American young people. Regarding spontaneous speech, in her Interpersonal Tasks Lainé always has the students talking about themselves in relation to what they read about French young people. Even though comparing is a difficult skill, with such strong scaffolding, novice students can work towards making comparisons.

And finish up your tour of IPAs that are available on the web with Rebecca Blouwolff’s site where you will find IPAs on la ville, la maison, les vêtements, les loisirs and la nourriture. Of note here is that Rebecca Blouwolff has an effective system for teaching students how to prepare for interpersonal tasks and for giving students feedback on interpersonal tasks. I wrote about how she sets up an interpersonal task in an earlier post; the point I want to make here is how she expertly incorporates a system using the TALK rubric, originally from The Keys to Planning for Learning by Clementi and Terrill. In this handout she explains her approach to the students and gives them pointers on how to prepare for evaluations. I commend her for the scaffolding she is building for students. She is showing them how to study for and approach these speaking assessments. This explanation really gets at what a successful speaker needs to do.