Four students at School 21 have road-tested a game which could form the basis of a new assessment for spoken language skills.
The ‘map task’ sets up a situation in which two students communicate complicated information to each other using only speech. Both holding maps, they sit back-to-back as one directs the other across a fictional island. One student has arrived in a cove at the island’s south-west corner, looking for treasure, which her map tells her is buried under a hill at the north-east – but the map is out of date, and she runs into a series of obstacles which have been built or deposited since it as made (roads, fences, fallen trees, the new channel of a river); knowing that a friend has an up-to-date map of the territory, she phones’ him, asking for help. The task chronicles their communication as she tries to enlist his help in drawing a new route to the spot marked ‘X’.
This task is even more difficult than it looks on paper because the map has a double function: it functions as a normal map of the island, but it is also the students’ only cue for imagining the place they are supposed to be lost in. Students could short-circuit the task by dispensing with its fictional dilemma and dealing directly with grid-references and yes-or-no questions: ‘Can I go to the square on my right? No? How about the one on the left?’ This in itself is an interesting and creative use of oracy skills.
The task was designed by the Assessment of Performance Unit in the 1980s. It was administered at School 21 by Ayesha Ahmed and Paul Warwick, of Cambridge University.