There seems to be a lot of anti-testing sentiment prevalent in the teaching world at the moment. There’s a particular degree of vitriol that seems to be reserved for standardised testing, but which has tapped a general anti-educational zeitgeist and spilled over, flooded even, into ELT. In this piece I’m hoping to look at where some of these attitudes to testing might come from and think about what might be the best way forward.
If you don’t know The Onion – you should take a look – it’s a satirical newspaper that sometimes hits the nail on the head. It’s also a great source of articles for use with classes – the occasionally puerile sense of humour appeals to teenagers, whilst the (not always) sophisticated parodies of mainstream news events makes adults smile. Also some great stuff for business English classes and I think they now have short videos which could be used for listening tasks.
Anyway – this was all prompted by a post from Larry Ferlazzo - The Best Education Articles From “The Onion” - with well – these are Larry’s picks for the best education related Onion material. My favourite is the cost cutting decision to remove the past tense from school curricula…. after all – who needs to talk about yesterday?
There is a lot of talk about learner needs, needs analysis and learner centred lesson planning and course planning. But do learners really know what they need? Or do they just tell us what they want?
The difference between “wants” and “needs” is neatly illustrated by the image on the right – a want is something that is desirable but unnecessary. A need is something you have to have no matter what! And do we always know the difference? I know that I often say I need to go and buy something, when the truth is, I can probably do without it!
In education the reliance on needs analysis worries me, as I fear it might be misplaced. After all, we go to our doctors and describe our symptoms but we don’t tell the doctor what to do next – why should we as language teachers rely on the input our learners give us? Surely as a professional I am capable of spotting the problems a learner is having, communicating those problems to the learner and working out a set of solutions.
But we don’t always notice and the doctor analogy is perhaps right – the learners come to us and say “I’m having problems” before we then think about what the causes and solutions might be. So learner input is valid – but can it be trusted?
From the always interesting yearinthelifeofanenglishteacher comes what is clearly the best blog post title of 2011: ”The zombie apocalypse and its role in the ELT classroom“.
I missed the original post in June, only picking up on it via Tyson Seburn’s 11 posts I wish I’d written in December, but it is a truly inspired way of teaching speculative language – mainly focusing on conditional forms – through the medium of you tube “choose your own adventure” style videos.
The original post features the Zombie Apocalypse (courtesy of a New Zealand pizza company ad campaign); the time travelling adventures of office-bound Chad, Matt and Rob; and a UK anti-knife crime campaign. This last features incredibly authentic North London dialect – while making the choices will be accessible to all levels – the language from the participants will not! Also worth watching it all the way through (as with all the videos) to check for suitability!
That last point is also worth making of all these type adventures, it’s not always necessary for learners to understand everything the characters in the videos say – unless you specifically want to work on listening skills – the choices, as you see from the picture above, are quite clear and these should prompt the discussion, which will in turn probably clarify any areas of confusion relating to the events on screen.
Finally – it’s also worth reading through the comments section below the post – some great ideas and further links from the commenters.
On the eleventh day of Geekmas, teflgeek gave to me: 11 tips for writingWelcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:
11 tips for writing
Although to be more accurate this should be called “11 tips to give your students to help them develop their writing (for exam classes)”, but again, that just wouldn’t scan properly…
Teachers – feel free to cut and paste and print out (some editing may be required!)
Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill that taxes most of us on a daily basis: ”I like your hair.” ”Your hair looks nice.” ”Wow! Have you had your hair done?” ”That new style really suits you!”
For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult. For learners preparing for exam classes, where displaying a wide ranging linguistic resource helps garner improved scores – it’s an essential skill. It’s useful for all those writing tasks (avoid using words or phrases from the questions) and particularly useful for CPE comprehension and summary tasks where the questions state “in your own words”. But it’s also a handy skill to have for those speaking tasks, where demonstrating ”range” is almost as important as actually having range. After all, there’s no point learning all those different words and structures if you don’t actually use them? Right?
So here’s an activity which needs no (only a very small amount) of preparation, but which helps extend and develop the paraphrase skill. I call it “Say that again?”
Materials: As much scrap A4 paper as you can find chopped down into either A6 or A7 sized slips – ideally it’d be about six bits of paper per student.
Students write a single (short) sentence on each bit of paper – ideally something they might say in everyday life. You can model this with “I like your hair.” or “Local football team played well/badly at the weekend.” Students can work together in pairs during the sentence creation phase.
Collect all the slips of paper up and ask the learners to form small groups (three or four people per group). re-distribute the slips of paper with the sentences on evenly between the groups, placed face down (i.e. sentences not visible) in a pile in the middle.
One learner takes a slip and turns it face up and reads the sentence. They then have to produce a paraphrase of the sentence, as does the next person and the next etc, until someone can’t come up with something that hasn’t already been said. So if we go back to our example: Learner A turns over the slip of paper and reads out ”I like your hair.” Learner A paraphrases thusly: ”Your hair looks nice.” Learner B comes up with “Wow! Have you had your hair done?” and Learner C with “That new style really suits you!”. Learner D however can’t think of anything new, so gets to keep the slip of paper.
The winner is the person in each group with the fewest slips of paper at the end of the activity.
Feedback can be given on any errors that were overheard during the game, but also content feedback on any sentences they found particularly difficult to paraphrase.
As an extension, for those classes preparing for an exam, the teacher could take the input from one of the writing paper questions and divide it up into sentences on separate bits of paper and ask learners to come up with alternative phrasings.
“The candidate demonstrated an impressive range.”
Following on from the success of the recent Radio 4 series “A History of the World in 100 objects“, linguist and novelist David Crystal attempts to do the same for the English language. An interesting read for any and all language teachers and language historians out there!
From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words – Telegraph.
If you were looking for a particularly challenging lesson for one of your advanced classes….. you could give them a selection of these words as a spelling test! And then divide the list and the class into four or five groups and set them off to discover what their words mean (and provide contextual sentences!).
Or they could just choose their favourites. Mine are numbers 43 and 49 – BODGERY and FOPDOODLE respectively.
(Thanks to Cherry M Philipose for sharing this via facebook)
At first glance, the free-wheeling Dogme approach to teaching and formal assessment do not sit well together. Rather they would appear to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, representing as they do either “winging it elevated to an art form” or rigid rows of desks and standardized testing models. The #eltchat on Wednesday 9th November 2011 tried to find out whether opposites might in this case attract, or at the very least whether this odd couple could form some kind of lasting (if uneasy) relationship.
If you’d like to look at the original transcript for this chat, you can find it on the #ELTchat wiki.
Dogme, like the term formal assessment, means different things to different people. Dogme is NOT winging it (PatrickAndrews), rather it is teaching without materials but with preparation (the teacherjames). You prepare your classes but go with the flow (esolcourses). Experience and skill can help with this (Shaunwilden), though pre-service teachers can be trained (the teacherjames). You should always remember the students’ needs and wants and not impose dogme(bethcagnol), and it works well with higher levels (rliberni).
Formal Assessment could be achievement tests or proficiency tests (ljp2010), exams (rliberni) or portfolio based (esolcourses). In general, people seemed to view “formal” assessment as tests or exams imposed on the class from outside, either by school management (e.g. end of year tests), national exam boards or student needs (e.g. IELTS / FCE / TOEFL etc).
Whether the two can co-exist is difficult to answer. As ever with these things the answer would seem to be “it depends”. The means of assessment (the testing tools) and the criteria being assessed both affect things (esolcourses), though if the test is a good one, it shouldn’t matter how the learners get there (teflgeek). Tests, unfortunately, are not always very good (PatrickAndrews) and may require specific item knowledge that therefore must be covered in class (ShaunWilden), or development of a narrow range of skills (esolcourses). Is the problem therefore the testing method, not the teaching method (teflgeek)? The fact that most schools don’t actually test properly certainly doesn’t make it any easier (Shaunwilden).
A Portfolio based approach to testing would be a better fit with a dogme approach to teaching (PatrickAndrews) and has worked for some (esolcourses), but teachers don’t often get the choice of test type (rliberni). Most testing is very “one size fits all” and there is a need for less rigidity and a more learner-centred approach to testing (esolcourses), though commercial realities make this difficult to implement (rliberni). Overall, we seem to be stuck with whatever we’re given to work with / aim towards.
Given then, that formal testing is often prescriptive and imposed, how can we reconcile the destination with the journey? Test / exam preparation often requires using past papers and extensive practice of task types (AlexandraKouk). Task familiarization is important (rliberni) but there is a difference between test familiarization and test practice and most of the research suggests test practice only goes so far (teflgeek), which is why you might want to ditch the exam material as loads of past papers are unnecessary (ShaunWilden). Though for learners who want to get through a test (e.g. IELTS et al), learner-centred teaching must by definition involve the test (rliberni).
Dogme and the Exam/Test Class: Ideas for teaching, revision and background links & references:
Hopefully all this is an accurate reflection of the discussion that took place – if you have anything to add – just let me know.
David Petrie (teflgeek)
It’s not until someone goes that you realise the impact they had on your life – Steve Jobs was one of those public figures who inspired belief and achievement in others.
One of my classes was asking if we could talk about Steve Jobs and his life, and clearly he meant a lot to a lot of people – so here are some resources that you can use with your learners.
The Guardian has a reader tribute interactive here: “Dear Steve, your products changed my life.” They also have a photo slideshow featuring reactions from around the world.
Also from the Guardian, this page “Steve Jobs: the 10 best tributes“.
The Lexical Press Blog from the American TESOL institute has a comemorative lesson plan available here: http://americantesol.com/blogger/?p=366
Cecilia Lemos at Box of Chocolates has an obituary style lesson plan available here: http://cecilialcoelho.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/hot-off-the-press-an-activity-about-steve-jobs/
@MrTESOL tweeted this link to an interactive online Steve Jobs quiz: http://www.tutor2u.net/business/bizquiz/061011/quiz.html.
Eva Büyüksimkeşyan at A Journey in TEFL has a lesson idea here: http://evasimkesyan.edublogs.org/2011/10/06/a-lesson-idea/, she also mentions Sean Banville’s News English lesson: http://www.newsenglishlessons.com/1110/111006-steve_jobs.html.
Via A school at the end of the world - I just came across The New York Times’ Learning Network post: “Imaging Apple Without Steve Jobs”
Finally, you’ve probably seen it elsewhere on the web recently – but here’s Steve Jobs’ famous speech at Stanford university:
I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space.
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions. The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a dictionary definition. One of the tasks they give is “Can you guess the idiom before the definition comes up?” If you had learners in teams with different coloured board pens, and they raced to write the expression on the board before it came up, it could work….
The videos are also available via the Pearson You Tube channel (I’ve tried to embed one of them below, but don’t think it’s worked – so click the link instead).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHo5DXDFGyo
Here’s the original page again: ELTCommunity.com: Space: Idioms Discussions.
Simon Thomas’ EFL resource Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day Free Technology for Teachers
