Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (42 page)

The way you handle the test depends on the importance you attach to it and your main objective. For example, you may tell the students the topic of the test and ask them to revise particular points that you feel are essential to their progress in the rest of the course. On the other hand, you may decide that the class should have a thorough review, so you don’t give the students specific details. This makes them revise everything so far.

A fun and effective way to organise a progress test is to allow the students to design it themselves. Break them into different groups, have each group construct a few questions, or ask each student to submit two or three questions each. As they review the topic and construct the questions, the topic becomes indelibly printed on their minds. There’s also an exciting level of competition and anticipation as they wait to see who gets their question right.

Testing achievement

Achievement tests are typically given at the end of the course. You can hold these up against the course syllabus and objectives to see how successful the lessons have been.

The success of a course may not be measured solely in language skills. A student may want to become more outgoing, creative or confident and her success or failure in this is dependent on her own feelings. Formal testing is incidental to her. It’s helpful to have class discussions about what each student hopes to achieve and how they expect to do so.

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Some of the different ways of testing achievement follow:

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True or false questions:
These can be less stressful for students because they test knowledge without necessarily involving writing skills.

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Gap-fill exercises:
In this kind of exercise you strategically omit certain words from a text in order to test particular areas of language.

Suppose you want to test your students’ knowledge of English prepositions.

You can cut the prepositions out of a text and provide the missing words in the wrong order below the passage, or you can leave out the missing words and make students come up with the prepositions on their own.

The words are provided in the following example:

Goldilocks went . . . the little house and saw a dining table . . . the left.

There were three bowls of porridge . . . the table and . . . each bowl there was a chair.

on into in front of of

The missing words can be listed in the wrong order below the test as I show here, as a multiple choice or just left out completely.

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Cloze:
This is a kind of gap-fill but the omitted words are more random, say every eighth word, so you get more of a feel for the students’ overall knowledge of the language. Try this one:

Teachers select texts from published materials or . . . exercises themselves.

The advantage of writing your . . . tests is that you can make them . . .

relevant to your students’ interests.

write own more

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Matching
: At lower levels especially, you can test vocabulary by matching words to pictures or single items to the appropriate categories. You can put a grammar slant on matching exercises by connecting sentences to the right tense label, or perhaps the beginning of a sentence to the appropriate ending. Figure 18-1 shows a matching vocabulary question.

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Dictation:
Dictations tend to conjure up bad memories for some but they needn’t consist of long dry passages. I find dictations very handy for practising listening, pronunciation and spelling all at once.

Here is one of my dictation lists: cap, cup, cop, cope, cape, cob.

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Transforming and rewriting:
In exams like Cambridge First Certificate in English, students have to show their ability to change a word from a noun into an adjective and rewrite a whole sentence incorporating a particular word. That’s why teachers like to get students used to this kind of exercise from early on. Take a look at these examples:

• Complete the sentence by transforming the word in brackets into the right form:

Chapter 18: Putting Students to the Test

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I am not sure if I should wear my coat because the weather is so . . .

(change).

• Rewrite the sentence so that the meaning is the same but include the word in bold.

Although it was raining, John still went to play tennis.
Despite
. . .

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Translation:
This isn’t very common in TEFL but it may be an appropriate test for more advanced students. The text for translation should include idiomatic expressions that reveal a student’s ability to understand the more subtle nuances of the language.

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Essays:
Essays test writing skills, as well as spelling, vocabulary and grammar. It’s quite important that an essay doesn’t become a test of imagination or creativity. During the marking stage, focus on specific language skills rather than level of interest. You can establish the criteria for awarding points beforehand so that you judge fairly.

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Presentation:
Students can prepare a short presentation on a chosen topic. This is an effective way of exercising speaking ability and can balance out the nerves that poor writers have when they take written tests.

A combination of tests should give everybody a chance to shine.

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Pair work tests:
When the course is primarily based on speaking, it may be unfair to test achievement through writing, so pairing students to demonstrate communication skills is a good alternative. Students can talk to teach each other to achieve the task while the teacher monitors and supervises. For example:

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Discuss which present is best for a new student at university: money (£50) two course books a strong rucksack

Write the number of a shape/shapes next to an adjective it describes For example: triangular –2

1)

2)

3)

4)

Figure 18-1:

A typical

matching

– 3 dimensional

vocabulary

– curved

exercise.

– symmetrical

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Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?

Marking Tests

One reason teachers are sometimes reluctant to administer a test to their class is because of their dread of marking and collating results. It can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Now the way you mark has much to do with the kind of test you set but the following are some general points that you can keep in mind.

If your time is severely limited, set a test that has just one or two possible answers for each question and write, or obtain, the answer key. In this way, anyone can help you mark, even a student.

The way you mark a student’s sheet itself is something to consider too. These days the red pen is considered a little bit threatening, so teachers often go for friendly green and purple pens instead. In any case, make your marking absolutely clear. Of course, this presupposes that the students are actually going to get their test papers back, or at least see them. Some schools keep test papers so that students can’t sell them on and help others to cheat, but they should at least have a chance to see their errors. For the sake of time you can just tick or cross questions.

Ticks and crosses aren’t common to every culture so let students know what each symbol means.

Use a marking code for longer answers, if your students are used to one.

Highlight a grammar error by writing ‘gr’ or ‘sp’ for spelling. This helps them to see what kind of errors they typically make and gives them an opportunity to try correcting the problem themselves. Chapter 7 has more on marking corrections.

For straightforward questions you can allow students to mark each other’s work. You need to be careful about cheating though, so you should insist that everyone puts their own pens away and then give everyone a pen in a special colour.

Having their work reviewed by another student can be embarrassing for some students so you need to be quite careful about sharing out this task. Get to know your students’ work and their personalities before trying this method.

It’s good to have a class feedback session about the test if possible. When you do that, you tackle the tricky questions that everyone got wrong. After all, it may be your fault because you didn’t teach that topic thoroughly, or because the test question wasn’t clear. You now have the chance to make up for it by re-teaching the point. For students’ individual errors you can employ peer correction, which means the students correct each other.

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Looking at Alternatives to Testing

Testing carries various disadvantages so you may want to try alternatives such as project work and continuous assessment. These tend to be less pressurised for most students and remove the problem of having a bad day at the time of the test, which results in an uncharacteristically poor performance.

A project in English is a great way for students to express their language skills and creativity at the same time. It is especially appealing to younger learners on short summer courses. By the end of the project they have something to show for their efforts and the opportunity to use the English they’ve learnt, or picked up, on their own terms.

Instead of filling in the gaps in a test the teacher has written, they choose their own topic and usually they find out what they need to know to achieve the task they set for themselves.

The problem is how to teach project work. Well, you can agree on certain things your students have to include, for example, the history or background, the current situation and future plans of the chosen celebrity, sport or whatever subject they’ve chosen. This at least pushes the students to use a variety of tenses.

You can also use
continuous assessment
so that every week or so you record the students’ progress, performances and achievements. To make the best use of time, the school should organise sheets that you can just tick or grade on each aspect assessed. Writing reports increases the teachers’

administration work considerably. However, when you assess students in this way, it’s easier to produce a final report at the end of the course rather than just a test score.

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Chapter 19

Getting Specific: Teaching Just

One Student and Business English

In This Chapter

▶ The pros and cons of one-to-one teaching

▶ Planning and handling a one-to–one session

▶ Who can teach business English?

▶ Planning and handling business English lessons

Although most teachers obtain some training in teaching general English in classes, there’s woefully little available in advice and support for teachers making the transition into one-to-ones and business English. So in this chapter I provide advice and tips about these two areas.

Evaluating One-to-Ones

From the outset I can tell you that teaching one-to-ones can be pretty lucra-tive. As they’re often two or three times the cost of class lessons in a school, it naturally follows that people who pay for a private teacher are well off or well motivated.

The typical students fall into several categories:

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The student who’s reached a reasonably high level of English, at least intermediate level, but who has no desire to commit to another formal course. These students want to maintain their English, probably by studying an hour or so each week, and prefer to have a conversation-based lesson without too much structure.

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The student with a specific goal in mind. These individuals have an exam looming or business trip coming up and want to prepare for a specific period of time. They need to develop skills in particular areas and require a needs analysis from you (I give information on needs analysis in ‘Working at Teaching Business English’ later in this chapter) as well as a syllabus.

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The student struggling to keep up with mainstream courses who needs extra support in order to stay level with his classmates. In this case the student often brings you the material that he’s struggling with, so part of your lesson is devoted to immediate homework issues and revision of topics covered in class that week.

Some schools set up self-access centres for their students. These take the form of libraries and computers loaded with EFL resources. If you work in a school with this kind of facility, you may find that teachers are asked to man the centre and be on hand to help students with particular problems, effectively giving short one-to-ones and tutorial support.

Listing pros and cons for the student

It’s good to think about the various advantages one-to-ones offer a student so that you can promote yourself if you decide to pursue this line of income:

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The teacher addresses the individual learning needs of the student.

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Shy students feel able to cope with just one other person.

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Students can voice their preferences about activities and topics, which they can’t do in a class setting.

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The lesson is never too fast or too slow. The student can go at his own pace.

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The student can have much more input at every stage of the course.

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There’s usually a great deal more flexibility in terms of time, location, content and so on.

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The teacher and student tend to develop a better rapport and understanding of each other.

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It’s a good way to keep the student’s English topped up.

On the other hand, the disadvantages for the student are that:

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Students often hope to make friends through the language school. With no classmates they can feel rather isolated.