3.1.1. Imitative English is the lingua franca of the modern world, and students of
different ages and language backgrounds learn it. Even though nearly 70%
of the world population employs the Latin alphabet, there are learners of
English in whose languages other writing systems are used (e.g., Arabic,
Chinese, Hebrew, Indian, Russian). What is more, in many languages where
the Latin alphabet is employed, the spelling, punctuation and capitalisation
rules can be very different from those in English. One example of such
difference is the rule of capitalisation of common nouns in English and
German. In English, common nouns (e.g., table, book, pencil) are not
capitalised unless found in sentence-initial positions. However, in German,
all nouns (both common and proper) are systematically marked by
capitalising their first letter (Pauli & Nottbusch, 2020). So, imitative
assessment tasks check whether or not (beginner-level, low intermediate)
learners know the rudiments of forming Latin letters, words and simple
sentences, as well as the punctuation and capitalisation rules in English.
With this group of assessment exercises, form is the primary focus, while
meaning and context are secondary concerns.
Examples of imitative writing tasks are copying tasks (e.g., copying
words/phrases from examples, listening cloze selections tasks, picture-cued
tasks, form completion tasks, converting numbers and abbreviations into
words) and spelling tasks (e.g., multiple-choice reading-writing spelling
tasks, matching phonetic symbols) (for more detailed explanations related to
those also see Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019; Heaton, 1990; Hughes,
2003).
Examples 4a and 4b present the steps and illustrate how a Dictation can be used as an in-class imitative formative assessment task. In this
exercise, the teacher wants to check whether the students can spell the
names of the illnesses they learned in their previous lesson before
progressing further.
