As a member of the MLF (Mission Laïque Française), LILA is part of a network of schools worldwide that strives to advance French secular education.  A few years ago, the MLF, with 17 member schools in the US, established a full-time coordinator to help set up pedagogical projects and training for the member schools.  Philippe Vanhille, our new Los Feliz campus director, was the pilot trainer and it is through this program that LILA got to know him.  LILA is an active participant in the regional training program. Last year, for example, the school loaned Julie Higounet, our Pedagogical Director, to other member schools to run workshops for their teachers.  This year, the MLF has expanded its project and Julie has a ¼ time position with the MLF to continue training other schools.

The MLF network schools chose Oral communication as the common project for all MLF schools.  This is relevant to LILA because the reality that students always have stronger skills in comprehension and that they do not all produce language at native levels is very present in all immersion programs.  Research findings clearly back this up.

A training program that adopted the work of the renowned pedagogical linguist Philippe Boisseau and his “albums echos” was launched.  The idea is that students enter reading after they have first learned to talk.  Written text is available to a child because oral communication systems are understood.  Therefore, mastering oral skills is key to being able to learn how to read.  The better a child speaks, the faster he will learn how to read. The program targets vocabulary building and grammatical acquisition of the language structures.

After a year of putting the program in place, we decided to invite Philippe Boisseau to come run a seminar and further the program by working with our teachers and seeing how they were doing.  Philippe Boisseau spent four days with us in Pine Summit this August and it felt as if we had a real celebrity amongst us.  The training went so well with the Cycle 1/2 (Preschool, Pre-K, and K) teachers that he has already agreed to come back next year to work with another group.

In the meantime, it is important for us to assess how well the program is helping our students.  Therefore, Julie Higounet has set up an evaluation system to track the individual progress of each student.  Three times a year, LILA pedagogical trainers Julie Higounet and Batiste Genestin together with the help of Pre-Kindergarten teachers will take students one-on -one to orally assess how the students are evolving and acquiring certain vocabulary and language structures.  The teachers will use the results to help adapt the program throughout the year but, ultimately, at the end of the year, the three tests will help us improve the way we teach oral communication and test whether or not the new program has succeeded in helping us increase student performance both on an individual basis and school-wide.  This is not a standardized test but it is one of the ways we try to ensure that our program does obtain the desired results.  So, do not be surprised when your kindergartener comes back home and says people came to talk to him today!

Every year LILA students sit for a record number of tests.  When I talk to people from other private schools, they stare in amazement at the volume of tests a LILA student will ultimately take.  Let’s run down the list.  In elementary, kids have traditionally taken the CTBS or the ERB which are the skills assessments.  Our 2^nd through 5^th graders take the week long series of tests to give us a feel of our students’ ability to compete with their monolingual peers outside of LILA.  This year, 2^nd and 5^th graders also take a French evaluation designed to help us see how our kids perform compared to their French monolingual peers in France.  In secondary the tests continue, 6^th through 8^th graders also have taken the ERB.  In 9^th grade, students begin preparing for the dreaded SATs and ACTs (a part of the university application process in the US) by taking their pre-level equivalents called PSAT and PLAN respectively.  9^th grade is actually early as most schools give these types of exams beginning in the 10^th grade.  We feel the head start is advantageous since LILA students are normally confronted with essay-type testing and tend to struggle with the time constraints imposed by the “multiple guess”-type exams that colleges use for entry. 

In addition to these American tests, our students also take the Brevet des College at the end of the 9^th grade. The Brevet is a French national exam which, in France, in effect provides a diploma to students before they choose to either go on to a regular high school or towards a system of education that is usually more technical or specific job skill related.  Outside of France, participation is, in theory, voluntary although LILA usually presents all 9^th grade students whether or not they arrived late and are not typically fluent in French yet.  Last year, again, 100% of the class passed.  In 10^th and 11^th grades the students continue the PSAT and PLAN exams and, of course, orient themselves towards the ultimate high school exams offered at LILA - either a French or an International Baccalaureate. We are the only school in the greater Los Angeles area which offers students these options. Both rigorous exam systems, each requiring two years of preparation, are recognized worldwide by universities and have helped open the doors for our students to major schools in the US and abroad. 

In addition to these tests, students will ultimately take the SATs and ACTs (we recommend they take both as different students obtain different results depending on which format they are more comfortable with).  We also encourage all students to take a French Language AP exam.  Many have taken the AP exam as early as 9^th grade with very strong results, which helps establish their level for universities. 

When you have students take as many tests as this, it is obvious that you have to take a step back and try to see how productive our assessments really are and if there exist alternatives that may be more useful.  A snapshot view of this past year’s testing is provided in the table on this page shows how LILA does on the ERB test. 

Although our students typically do well on the ERBs (better than the results from the “top” American schools I visit as a member of WASC accreditation teams), we decided to change the test we use for our students to measure their performance in English.  We made the switch for a couple of reasons:

1. The ERBs are not reflective of our students.  The testing is supposed to paint a picture of each child so that we can use the information to adapt the curriculum for any given group. When we saw how our students perform in class and then saw their scores on the ERBs, we did not recognize the students.  The results would come back for the ERB and far too often teachers did not feel the test adequately represented the strengths and weaknesses of the kids.  We have not experienced this when using other tests and that was disconcerting; it made the test no better than a time-consuming activity that allowed us to ‘smile and file” results.

2.  Also, the ERBs are becoming more irrelevant in the types of skills they're testing.  For example, they have many analogy questions; although they are seen in class, the children are not drilled in analogies making this a difficult skill to acquire.  Also, analogies have been taken off the SAT exams for college entrance.  The questioning manner of the ERBs is very ambiguous and unless the school/teachers are teaching directly to that exam, the children have a hard time understanding what is being asked. 

For these reasons, we have decided to move to the Stanford 10 testing system.  The Stanford Achievement Test (10th Edition)is a nationally standardized assessment of student knowledge, which has been developed based on new content reflecting national and state standards of learning. The purpose of the Stanford 10 is to provide educators with information that will assist them in evaluating the academic strengths and weaknesses of their students and will help guide the content of their teaching. The children will be tested in three categories:  Reading Comprehension, Language, and Math.

The Reading Test assesses word study skills, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The Mathematics Test assesses problem solving and procedures.

The Language Test assesses student understanding of language mechanics (i.e. capitalization,

punctuation) and sentence structure.

As with all standardized tests we have used, these tests were given this year in 2^nd – 5^th grade in early May.  The secondary in Los Feliz will be taking the tests the week of the 25^th of May (in the four days after Memorial Day). 

However, beginning with the 2009-10 school term, we will be implementing the Accelerated Reader / Star Program (a reading assessment program), so we will begin the standardized testing in 3^rd grade and will no longer have the tests administered in 2^nd grade.  This time frame actually follows what is mandated by the State of California.