I think that multiple forms of testing need to be
incorporated in the foreign language classroom in order to ensure that students
are learning as much as possible in every area of learning a language: reading,
writing, speaking and listening. After reading Chapter 9 and about the
different methods of testing in the foreign language classroom, what came to my
mind were all the examples of teachers I had previously had in foreign language
classes that only utilized one or two of these forms of testing. For example,
in my high school French classes my teacher put very little emphasis on oral
proficiency and did not test us on listening comprehension or our competence in
speaking. When I reached the university level and began taking French classes,
I did very well and placed into French 503 on the placement exam, but when I
began the class I was shocked at how far behind I was in terms of listening and
speaking because it was something that I had hardly been tested on. I could
read and write French very well, but speaking it and listening to a native
speaker and comprehending what they were saying was very difficult for me
because I did not have that extra practice and testing in that area. In order
to be effective teachers, it is completely necessary that we incorporate all
these different areas of foreign language proficiency into testing.
One thing that I really agreed with in Chapter 9 was the importance
of not just including open-ended questions or just grammar questions, but a
mixture of both. Both skills are necessary and crucial to testing in the
foreign language classroom to measure how much of the grammar, sentence
structure and vocabulary that a student knows (such as with fill in the blank
grammatical questions) and to measure how much of the content and context the
student is able to master (such as with open-ended questions that leave the
student to hypothesize and formulate their own coherent sentences and answer).
In my beginning Spanish classes in high school, almost all of the tests and
quizzes that I had to take were simple grammatical tests where we just had to
fill in the correct verb conjugation to fit the sentence or circle the correct
vocabulary word that completed a phrase. While this is a good skill to learn,
it left me and many other students in my classes totally unprepared for when we
reached Spanish III and suddenly we were expected to read Spanish novels and
write papers every week about various topics and were often tested using
open-ended questions to prove that we had comprehended the main themes or
stories we had learned about that week. Based on the experiences that I have
had in my own foreign language learning, I think it is completely necessary
that teachers integrate many aspects of foreign language learning into testing
so as to best measure their students’ proficiency level in that language.
I agree with your post. I think that it is extremely important to include a mixture of testing styles not only to test and understand a student's different skills but also to adhere to a variety of different learning styles. Sometimes students can understand only the smaller picture or larger picture but cannot connect the two together. Using a mixture of testing styles allows students to branch out their understanding and really have the opportunity to express what they know.
ReplyDeleteI agree as well, but I am wondering when you should introduce open ended questions. How do you know when students are ready to use the target language to create? I think that having background knowledge is very important, but when do you make the transition to more advanced comprehension? Should this occur from day one? It seems that Spanish III is when many teachers expect students to read and write in the target language. Why? How are students supposed to be prepared if they don't do much comprehension work in the lower levels?
ReplyDeleteIn terms of language testing, I think that teachers need to make sure that all of the bases are covered. Like you said, it is important that they used a variety of assessments to accurately evaluate their students progress. Giving students single-sentence grammar phrases isn't really going to give the teacher much feedback on how proficient their students are. I agree with you that open-ended questions and simple grammar points both need to be part of a cumulative assessment.
ReplyDeleteWhen you described your high school foreign language experiences it reminded me a lot of my own experiences with high school language learning. Thinking back to the tests we took, they were all paper-based achievement tests with a focus on the grammatical structures and vocab that we studied in that unit of the textbook. There was never any focus on speaking - ever. The only thing we were expected to produce on a regular basis was "Permite ir al bano por favor" which clearly is not even close to enough. Teachers need to get more creative with test types and strive to test the proficiency of their students as a whole, not just their understanding of one "unit." In order for tests to be proficiency based, however, the classroom instruction must also be proficiency based.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I think I can say with confidence that my early L2 learning was fairly balanced as far as listening, reading, and speaking are concerned. I think that, although it may not have been a daily or even weekly occurrence, my classes usually included some form of listening comprehension. This allowed us to have a good input other that the teacher always doing the speaking, and allowed us to understand more accents or dialects as well. I can definitely see, however, how some teachers do not put enough emphasis on listening and speaking, and rely instead on reading and writing. In one of my observations, the teacher told me that the class did not spend much time on listening because it was difficult for the teacher to find material that coincided with her lesson plan. In one of my classes, however, my teacher actively sought to incorporate listening by basing some of his classes on whatever the material was. We once had a class on Barcelona and the differences between Catalan and Castellano just because my teacher wanted to show us a video about the Barcelona football team.
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