Nothing to say (c) bommelmützenkind, via Flickr

It’s a tough time of the year for me at the moment.  It’s the start of the new academic year, so learning groups have to be formed and teachers need to be assigned..  For those who want to know more about the English system we use, here is the first and the second article which go some way to explaining it.  A big issue this year is oral testing – for me the most important aspect of an English course and the most revealing.  At the moment we test candidates individually which has the advantage that we can focus of language skills, but has the major disadvantage that the candidate is not really tested on discourse skills.  For that reason, I really want to test the candidates in pairs this year which will introduce a whole new set of challenges for both the learners and the teachers.

To get the bad news out of the way first…  Concentrating on a couple of hundred kids speaking somewhat sloppy to really bad English is hard on the nerves.  Some of the kids are trying their hardest without much success, and some simply don’t care.  The important thing to remember is that they are all entitled to a professional evaluation.  To that end, the kids are always tested by two teachers who are neither their current English teacher, nor their class teacher.  The pairings of the teachers are also rotated regularly to limit bad habits setting in.  This goes some way to making the evaluation as neutral as possible.

The challenge of marking oral tests is, as anyone who has done it regularly will know, to judge the balance between communication and accuracy – one candidate doesn’t say much, uses a limited range of vocabulary, but is quite accurate; whilst another talks a lot, but makes frequent minor mistakes and some serious errors.  I see it as entirely possible for both students to get the same mark (though for very different reasons).  If anyone thinks otherwise, please say so. In this respect I’m working from belief rather than from knowledge.

Now for the scary bit…  It’s obvious that different teachers mark differently and frankly I’m surprised how often we agree.  For example, one colleague consistently awards five to ten percent more than I do.  Another consistently gives around ten percent less.  When different testers work together we can create an adjustment scale which can even out such differences.  It would probably be better to sit down together and discuss the differences and agree on a common approach, but this would take quite a lot of time (to say the least) and time is something which certain colleagues values as a priceless commodity.  What really worries me is that some colleagues fluctuate wildly in their oral marking – something which isn’t apparent in their text evaluation.  I have one who routinely varies from plus twenty percent to minus forty percent.  Others are less extreme, but very inconsistent nonetheless.  I wondered if it was me, but other colleagues have privately confirmed my experience.  Added to this, some are very convinced that their appraisal is accurate and are not particularly open to negotiation.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know what the solution is here.  I’d be very interested in hearing from teachers who have agreed on oral benchmarks or standards and learning how they were implemented.  At the moment I’m stuck with the opinion that some teachers are good at this and others aren’t.  With that as a starting point. the idea of complicating the evaluation further is daunting to say the least.

The core of the problem is that the kids at my school are largely weaker learners and added to that they often lack the life skills experience to know what to talk about.  As an experiment, I conducted some English oral tests in German and the results were depressing.  The communication level scarcely improved at all.  As an example 90% of the kids answered the question, “What did you do last weekend?” with “Nothing.”  When pressed, “nothing” turned out to be going out with friends, playing computer games, buying clothes and going to the cinema – more than enough to to fill a basic oral test, but the candidates really do believe that all that is nothing.  A rather more shocking example was that 35% of the kids had no idea what their fathers did for a living – something which I had always thought was the result of a vocabulary deficiency.  I now know it’s result of a family communication deficiency.

Intercultural differences feature here.  I’m well aware from my adult teaching that Germans often find small talk extremely challenging, not because of language issues, but because they simply don’t know what they should talk about.  Even skilled learners often sound very stilted during this stage of a conversation – as if they are ticking off a checklist.

Now the State authorities have been making noises for a couple of years about introducing oral testing of pairs of candidates and although I really don’t expect this to become fact within the next two or three years, I would very much like our school to be ahead of the game.  To that end I am visiting schools in other countries this Autumn to see how they do it and begin to work out how we should implement such testing in our school.

The big issues are the differences in the evaluations by teachers and the kids who have nothing to say.  Both of these issues will be exacerbated by a more complicated system and that is before the kids, who have almost no culture of teamwork, start to complain that their testing partner is responsible for a bad performance.

I have the feeling…  No.  I know that doing the right thing is going to create a lot more work this year. Ideas are very welcome.

About a week ago, I posted an article about teaching children according to their ability rather than according to what year they are in at school.  In addition to the comments on the post itself, I got some favourable remarks and shoutouts on Twitter.  Given that the system is “my baby” I’m extremely conscious of rambling on for far too long about it, and so I tried to cut it down to the essentials and made the classic teaching mistake of expecting my audience to understand the finer points without further explanation.  Having worked with the system for the large part of the last decade I sometimes forget that the system is not self-explanatory.  So thank you to the people who posted and tweeted questions.  For anyone who missed the original post, you can find it and the comments here.

I’m going to start with perhaps the most fascinating question, which was put by Pandoora who asked:

does this mean my 13-year-old daughter and I shouldn’t be bothered by her having to sit next to that 16-year-old gang banger boy who keeps getting retained and can’t seem to get out of middle school? Continue reading »

(c) Sunshine on the Road, via Flickr

When I was younger, it wasn’t all that unusual to see a small kids struggling to get around on his or her big brother’s bike.  It always looked a bit strange.  It was undoubtedly both somewhat dangerous and tiring, and the kid would have always been better served by having a bike of the right size.  Obviously, not every family could afford it.  And if you travel a lot in developing countries, you will still regularly be confronted with such a sight.

Now ask yourself this…  If you decided to learn a new language and went to evening school to enrol in a course would you find the following conversation between yourself and the enrolment clerk odd?

“Hello, I’ve decided I’d like to learn Chinese.”
” That’s great!  How old are you?”
“Er… Forty-two.  Why?”
“Excellent.  We’ll put you in a Level 6 Course”
“But I’m a beginner!”
“At 42 you should be in Level 6.”
“Er…”

If you don’t find the above odd, then stop reading now – this article is not for you.  For the rest of you, ask yourself the following:  Why do we do that with foreign languages in schools? Continue reading »

OK, so I haven’t updated for a while. I know this is fatal for a blog, but a major new project landed in my lap, and the choice was to work on the project or write about working on the project.

It will be up and runnig properly in the next day or so, and then I’ll be able to write about it here.

Until then, keep checking back, and I promise I’ll be back in the swing by the end of the week.

So, having blogged in my last post about recalcitrant teachers and their attitude to working in the holidays, it stands to reason that I should give some feedback on the conference I attended this which caused the debate. I had thought about whether the atmosphere at the ISTEK ELT conference might be a bit too national for it to be of any lasting use to me because although it was billed as an international conference, it was clear that the prime focus was on home grown teachers. Having said that, the plenary speakers were all well-known international practitioners and I also knew quite a lot of the people offering workshops through Twitter so I was confident that the the standard would be high. I was wrong.

The standard was not high, it was stratospheric. At the opening, we were asked to think during the weekend about the one thing we would take away from the event, but as time went on it became increasingly clear that one thing would not be enough. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I arrived early the day before the conference, having taken an overnight flight (I hearby swear that I will spend the extra money and book a flight at a sensible time in future!) The cheapskate in me also said that I would get from the airport to the venue by bus – cheaper than a taxi and more opportunity to see some of the real Istanbul. Now I pride myself in being able to get by in a handful of languages including one or two exotic ones, but in trying to get on the bus I realised that I have no knowledge whatsoever of Turkish, not a single word. OK, so adopting the Churchill principle (which co-incidentally, Andrew Wright referred to in his opening address) I spoke loud slow English and was promptly directed to another bus. From that bus, I was sent back to the original bus which had by then departed. With the next one I sent off into Istanbul. Given my sleep-deprived state, I was very pleased that the organisers at Yeditepe University had a room immediately available. A couple of hours’ sleep did the trick. Continue reading »