Assessment: Art or Science?

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I have been involved in an English language testing assessment and evaluation course for the last 6 full days.  Therefore, although it is not my area of expertise I have been thinking about it frequently these days.
I am not a tester per se, but I have been part of the trials with my colleagues for a long time, and we kept thinking:
– Can the tests we have been creating be considered as valid?
– Are we testing exactly what we want to test?
– Are our questions too hard? Too easy?
– Are the texts we use suitable to the level?

Well, we thought that probably we were not the only group who have had the same concerns. Then we looked for some courses specifically designed for language testing. But there were not any :(. As in the case of famous teacher training cerificate programs, degree and masters programs, testing has been thought the last if ever. Such an important area needs a lot more focus.
Personally speaking, there should be degree programs in ELT Testing, Assesment and Evaluation.

Anyway, since it was not possible to change the curricula of the certificate programs, degree or masters programs, we came up with the idea of a 40-hour intensive course. Lovely IATEFL TEA SIG committee embraced the idea, and a week long course for 53 participants took place last week in Istanbul called TEA in ISTANBUL. The course tutors were Prof. Barry O’Sullivan, Sue Hackett, the IATEFL TEA SIG coordinator, Zeynep Urkun from Sabanci University and the IATEFL TEA SIG events coordinator and member of the IATEFL executive board member.

As an EFL teacher, I have had to test student performance all my professional life, sometimes by using ready made tests, sometimes by the tests I
prepared or a test of which preparation I was heavily part of it. Most of the English teachers do that as well. However, there are incredible details a tester has to consider while planning, preparing, administrating, marking and analysing the results if they want to do it as appropriately as they can. and even then, we learned that there isn’t such a thing called a perfect test.

I came to the conclusion that, while teaching is an art, testing must surely be science.

I kept the blog of the event with the help of my friends Burcu Akyol and Wayne Jones. If you want to know more about the specific details about assessing reading, speaking, writing, etc, there are useful notes, tips and great website addresses for checking the level of difficulty of the tests you create, please visit http://teainistanbul.wordpress.com

The link to the Lightbulb moments show comments and what the participants’ insights gained from the course.

Enjoy 🙂

6 Tips to kill learner autonomy in EFL “Learner Autonomy”;

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Learner Autonomy: most of us like the concept of it. Some of us underline the importance of it. Some of us think that it is a great idea but our learners cannot become autonomous because their families didn’t raise them that way or only highly skilled/enthusiastic learners can reach autonomy. A few of us believe in the possibility and work on it consciously. Anyway, below are the six things, I believe, that does not help learner autonomy whatsoever.

1. Not considering/not empathizing with learner difficulties

Even if the learner is a highly intelligent, skillful professional with a degree, s/he is vulnerable and anxious while learning a foreign language. A foreign language teacher’s initial job is making the learners feel that they are in a safe learning atmosphere. It is not utterly easy to learn a language especially when you are an adult or a teenager. There are millions of other things on your mind, and learning a language require concentration and a strong will as well as great determination. It is our job to consider the levels of difficulty of the tasks, possible problems that can occur while learning a certain aspect of that day’s target language.

2. Spoon-feeding while presenting the language

Not letting learners discover the target language by themselves and for themselves, not trusting the learners’ skills and/ or intelligence also kill autonomy. Inductive language teaching by means of contextualised input  works wonders, but some of us love to be the ‘giver’ of the knowledge:) or controlling everything.  Or some of us use documents like this one, of which aim I have not been able to figure out since I found it next to the photocopy machine in the institution I work for. Puzzled?? Yes, me too.

Guess what? Some of the learners learn despite us.

 

3. Crushing confidence by constantly correcting errors and focusing on mistakes rather than meaningful and timely praising

Mistakes mean that the learner is trying to learn. So long as the focus is not just accuracy, we need to learn how to postpone our feedback on mistakes. In written work, who likes it when it is full of red ink correction! I remember once, I had given a composition to my Italian teacher with all my enthusiasm and belief in the best work I could have come up with. I will never forget how my heart had sunk whe nI saw all the mistakes on the paper:(. Did I ever look at that paper again? Did I try to learn from these mistakes? No! Even though I am an eager language learner in general who was willing to learn Italian at the time. How about giving focused error correction instead of correcting every single mistake?

4. Using Worksheets with Azar type exercises as class materials:

Fill in the blanks with the correct form of the verbs given in the brackets.

Remember that instruction? Exactly 🙂 All of us have given them; some of us have given them sometimes, some of us have given them when we are too lazy, a few of us have given them when it was absolutely necessary, for whatever the reason is. Those of us who wanted to make learners autonomous have taken them with a pinch of salt. Why? How can one learn how to retain the required language in real life by answering these type of decontextualised, mechanical and non- personalized exercises? See the sample on the left; who can tell me the learning objective of this material? Who can tell me the learning outcome or the communicative value of it? Please let me know if you do. I certainly cannot.

5. Not teaching strategies while teaching skills and subskills

Scan the text below and answer the questions. OR listen to the tape recorder and answer the questions below. OR OK, you two, you are working in pairs. Here are the role cards, OK. A: You have a headache and you are complaining about it to your friend. B: You give suggestions to your friend. Now go. OR OK, everybody, I’d like you to write about the most important day in your life in 10 minutes. Well, you know past tense, you can do it, no complaints, come on!

How about sparing a few minutes before showing a few different strategies/models to do the task and sparing a few minutes more after the activity for double- checking how it is achieved instead of just checking the answers with the strongest in the front seats.

6. Not teaching different ways of recording vocabulary

Different people learn lexis differently. It is our job to show them as many techniques as we can for them to choose from. Research says that students learn only 20% of their vocabulary thanks to us. Teaching them ways of recording them will help them retrieve the words when they need it. It will help them reach autonomy. After all, we will not be able to teach them 7000-8000 word families that allow them to become completely independent and fluent users of English (Schmitt, 2008)!

 

Awareness-I An anology and professional development

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‘Awareness is the capacity to recognize and monitor the attention one is giving or has given to something. Thus, one acts on or responds to the aspects of a situation of which one is aware.’ (Freeman, 1989)

Awareness is an essential aspect of language teaching and teacher education, as it is, or should be, part of one’s everyday life.  Without awareness of a certain aspect in question, monitoring one’s (own) actions and/or behaviour in that area would simply be impossible.

One incident from everyday life made me aware of the unquestionable relationship and interconnection between knowledge, skill, awareness and attitude suggested by Freeman 1989).

One evening in March 2009, there was a knock on the door. I was surprised to see a man who said that he was my downstairs neighbour. He said that he had been living in that apartment since the previous July (for about 9 months), and then started to complain about the noise of my footsteps which, he called unbearable. He said he had never come upstairs to complain so far but that evening he had had enough. I was truly shocked to hear this :(, and could not believe that I had been the source of such trouble. I immediately apologised for disturbing him, thanked him for warning me as I wasn’t aware of this at all and promised to be more careful.

Since that day I have been attentive while walking in the corridors. Naturally, I do not always remember the warning; however, I have developed a kind of internal awareness which makes me monitor my steps and even my husband’s steps as well. At this point, it would be important to acknowledge my attitude as I could be a person who wouldn’t care for the warning. As an adult, I had the knowledge and the skill of walking in an apartment but I needed a warning which raised my awareness to correct or repair my behaviour. I responded to the warning by monitoring my attention to it since my attitude is responsive to this warning.

Without the direct intervention by a supervisor or evaluations on self or peer observations or any other reflective practices which would trigger one’s attention to a certain aspect of teaching behaviour, it is unlikely to change that certain behaviour even though the teacher in question is a fully prepared responsible person.

 I will continue to write about awareness and how important it is in teaching. There are aspects in our teaching that needs to be improved. Most of us are unaware of some of these. We keep going in our blissful unawareness. Until one day, we are made aware of tha,t and let to take a deliberate action  to repair it. Like my neighbour’s warning on my footsteps. The good news is, he has never come back 🙂 so I can safely say that my deliberate action repared my behaviour that I was unaware of thanks to the fact that I was made aware of it.

Reference

Freeman, Donald (1989). Teacher Training, Development and Decision Making; A model Teaching and Related Strategies for Language Teacher Education TESOL Quarterly, Vol.23, No. 1, March 1989

 

Tips for Teaching English Abroad from my guest blogger, Elaine.

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 For both experienced teachers and students hoping to travel the world, teaching EFL can be a profitable and interesting job. You may not need a master’s degree to do it, but teaching overseas can be quite different from tutoring and teaching positions in your home country. Here, we offer several tips for success for those individuals planning for (or already involved in) a career teaching EFL.

1. Gather real-world resources

Real objects and resources can be used in a variety of ways, from vocabulary building to reading to descriptive writing, and practically everything in between. Before leaving for your destination, collect free and lightweight English resources that could be used in a classroom. These might include restaurant menus, sales ads from local stores, maps of real cities, and magazines. Using such English materials provides EFL students with access to authentic English usage they are unlikely to get outside of the classroom.

 2. Learn about educational norms and expectations

 Education in your home country may be fairly informal. Teachers may often dress casually, have students use their first names, and drink coffee in class. In other countries, however, educational settings may be more formal, and students could balk at such informality. Students in other countries may also be accustomed to lecture classrooms rather than conference-style discussions or interactive classroom tasks. EFL teachers may need to gradually introduce discussion and other participatory activities to help students adjust to new methods.

3. Learn the Language

Efforts to learn the local language can be quite beneficial to EFL teachers. Experiencing the difficulties of language learning helps make teachers more empathetic to the struggles of their own students. These classes may also provide information about similarities and differences between the local language and English, which can be capitalized on in the EFL classroom.

4. Make use of the Internet

Online resources to aid English language learning are seemingly limitless. Students can learn vocabulary, review grammar, take quizzes, and even listen to examples of real English speakers. Teachers can find grammatical explanations and examples, and many sites have downloadable handouts and print-ready assignments. Such resources can be invaluable to EFL teachers whose classroom resources and ready access to English language realia may be limited.

5. Provide lots of English input

Input is a necessity for language learning. During class, EFL teachers should speak only in English, especially since it may be the only time students hear English all day. Rather than doing written work in class, have students complete it as homework, and reserve classtime for active spoken English usage. The more students hear and understand English, the easier it will be for them to produce it, so plenty of classroom use of English is essential. Homework assignments that utilize online resources will also provide students with additional input outside class.

6. Know your students

Successful teachers identify and build relationships with their students. One crucial first step in establishing relationships is learning the names of everyone in each class. Teachers should also learn more about the students’ goals for their English and their motivation for studying the language. Teachers who know their students are better able to choose topics and communicative tasks that will be appealing to a particular class.

These six tips provide both potential and current TEFL professionals with hints for success in teaching EFL. Outside the classroom, teachers should consider resources, educational norms, and the local language. Inside the classroom, teachers should creatively use resources, spoken English, and knowledge of their students. By doing these things, teachers are sure to create a more successful learning experience for all involved.