Literacy Professional Learning Resource

Back to:

VELS Level 1 and 2 – Tell Me: A Collaborative Language Activity

Tell Me is an assessment task based on students retelling of texts read to them. It is a useful way of assessing students grasp of language structures and the use of language to convey meaning, comprehension and sense of story in the language that will be used in a classroom environment.

  • (School Entry Assessment Guide for Teachers, Curriculum Corporation, 1999) Special booklets were prepared for this task in the School Entry Assessment Guide for Teachers, but this activity can be used with any text.

Implementation phases of Tell Me

Familiarisation phase

Students become familiar with the process of retelling a story, read to them earlier, using classroom books.

Assessment phase

Collaborative reading

The teacher reads a selected text to the students and then asks them three comprehension questions.

Retelling

A student retells the story to two or three other students. The teacher then assesses the retelling focusing on sentence structure and vocabulary. The teacher makes global judgements about organisation, description, expression and content throughout the retelling of the book.

Scoring

The retelling is scored in a number of ways using a comparative scoring scale (e.g. none, basic, plain, developed). Scoring focuses on one aspect of language behaviour at any one time.

The aspects scored are:

  • sentence complexity
  • vocabulary
  • organisation
  • description and expression
  • content.

Notes

The Tell Me procedure can be adapted for regular classroom use with a variety of texts. Retelling in this way gives teachers an indication of how students have improved over time.

Professional learning

Use the Tell Me student transcripts (PDF - 128Kb) to complete the following activities:

  • read the transcripts taken from three student retellings noting their use of oral language and their comprehension of the text
  • select a text that would be suitable to use for a Tell Me assessment with some of your students. Design a record sheet for your selected book using the Tell Me record sheet from the transcripts as a model.
Back to Top