After reading Chapter 9, I definitely thought of testing in a different way. Actually, maybe not differently, but it became clear to me what good tests consist of. That is, some of the activities mentioned are what I see my cooperating teacher do on her tests. I assumed that all she was testing for was general grammatical understanding, but now I see that it is much more. In fact, I have seen her tests work as a way to judge overall language proficiency. Recently, students took an exam and did not do well on it. They struggled where they had to show their general understanding and provide the meaning of certain things. My cooperating teacher took this as a sign that more time must be spent learning those concepts. Students could produce the formulaic answers, but when it was put into the larger context, their understanding was lost. This if anything was proof to me that varied testing does work in regards to student proficiency.
The only concern I had when reading this chapter was how do you know when you are asking students to do too much on a test? I think that they do need to be challenged and many strategies should be incorporated into testing, but what if a teacher is asking too much? I find this difficult sometimes because we are the ones that know the language. We might assume students can put things into context that they cannot yet. I suppose this could be a process of trial and error. If students are unable to answer open ended questions or pick the appropriate verb from the work bank, then perhaps the teacher needs to back track and make sure they are teaching the students strategies to using context. I think that teachers need to make sure they emphasize the importance of overall meaning rather than specific grammar points if this kind of testing is going to be utilized.
I agree that students need to be taught in order to be able to put things into a wider context. I think that teachers should be able to gauge if students are able to do this by giving them homework and in class assignments that will challenge them and will be similar to what is on the test. It wouldnt be very fair for a teacher to teach the entire unit with just matching or true/false and then have students be tested on using the new language in an entirely new way.
ReplyDeleteWow after reading your second paragraph, I never really considered that maybe it's possible that we are asking too much from our students. Or rather, how do we know if we are asking too much or not? I understand that we need to challenge our students but what if they really can't see the bigger picture, like you mentioned. How do we distinguish between a challenging assessment or maybe that reality that our students actually don't know how to do something?
ReplyDeleteI like your comment that overall meaning or feeling should be emphasized more than specific points. With these kinds of tests, sometimes it is easy as a teacher to appreciate the overall outcome or feeling of a test and instead focus on specific errors in whatever subject the test may be on. I think its important for teachers to understand that students sometimes apply native language concepts to the new language and it causes errors which could be simply corrected if thought of as overall misunderstandings.
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