As I write my end-of-year reports for my groups, it's occurred to me that in every school I've worked in (that's about 5 in Barcelona and another 5 in Poland) we test students on their grammar, vocabulary and writing mainly but never on speaking.
As language is very much a spoken phenomenon, and most (if not all) of my students are learning English for the purposes of spoken communication, isn't this situation, bizarre, ridiculous, perverse even in the extreme?
Arguably, it could be said the ONLY yardstick for measuring students' ability in the language is to focus on the spoken English they produce, so how come for so many schools it isn't even a feature?
Even if we are not to take such extreme measures, surely it's obvious that speaking needs to be assessed and graded - both to force our students to use the language and to benefit them in the long run?
So, what do you think? Firstly I'm interested to see who goes along with this argument; how to implement it is another thing but if you've got any ideas on this or use spoken testing as standard, then I'd love to know how you go about it.
Steven
Good point Steven. If you are going to test them, then it has to be on the based on the reason for why they are learning the language in the first place. And if speaking is the priority, then it should be obvious.
ReplyDeleteTesting speaking is much harder than the other skills though, so I wonder if it's actually a case of administrators trying to avoid having to create a difficult and hard to manage exam. Cynical, moi?
That said, I have to say I'm not convinced that they should be tested at all, but that's another conversation!
Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteI totally go along with your point schools don't assess it because they don't know how... so much easier to give a multiple choice gapfill, eh?
As for the necessity of testing at all - hmmm interesting. It's motivating and focusing for the stundents for me (to test them, that is). In Poland at least, I think the very idea of NOT testing would BLOW people's MINDS and cause widespread panic!