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.

(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 »

(c) Michael Sarver, via Flickr

I listened to a disturbing conversation last week.  I was standing at a buffet table with two experienced teachers who I’ve known for some time were discussing the relative merits of the English curriculum in their respective states in Germany.  Quickly it broadened out into a debate as to which of the major publishers produced the most curriculum-oriented course book.  One major publisher apparently only focuses on competences, another is slavish in following the prescribed pedagogy.  Part of my job is to know what’s on the market, so the opinions on the books were interesting.  However, as the conversation went on my irritation grew and eventually I felt forced to add an opinion.  The two teachers stared at me as if I had suddenly grown another nose on my face and ignored my question completely and continued discussing which publisher taught Shakespeare better.  What had I said, that was so totally unimportant? Continue reading »

copyright ccarlstead (via Flickr)

I read a fascinating blog article the other day about failure in the classroom.  That in itself is an unusual subject for public discussion as the focus is almost always on success and how to succeed.  The article, written by Alan Sitomer looks at the question of when bad results become a symptom of a bad teacher.

I remember doing a mock O Level in English at school.  Our class got pretty bad marks and the English teacher laid into us big style.  At our school it was normal to get mock exams that were harder than the real thing, but in this case the teacher hadn’t taught us a major part of the material that was tested.  He ranted on about our approach to learning and I muttered that the results might have something to do with the teaching.  He carried on with his tirade.  I repeated my remark a touch louder, but he was in full flow.  I made the remark again – it still wasn’t much more than a whisper…  He turned to me.  “I heard you the first time – detention.”

I never found out if he had made a mistake, or whether it was all part of the plan.  Anyway, for the most part we did pretty well in our English O Level.

So now I’m a teacher responsible for a pilot system for teaching English and from time to time I’m confronted by a bad set of marks.  There are standard tests and standardised marking for the learning groups, so I know that a bad set of marks in a group comes from one of three things: Continue reading »