English Language Teaching Language and Assessment Harmful Effects of Tests: A Personal Experience - Term Paper Example

English Language Teaching Language and Assessment Harmful Effects of Tests: A Personal Experience Testing is an important tool in human life especially among learners. However, there are many types of tests that are administered depending on the purpose. For instance, a teacher conducts a test to measure his students progress in a particular subject. However, the application of testing goes beyond the field of education .In fact , testing is incorporated in certain fields like medicine, sports , drama ,and criminal justice. Nowadays, it is a practice in important football contests to test players for drugs. In testing skills, a driving test is a must in almost every country to be eligible for driving. In the field of medicine, some countries require the bride and bridegroom to be tested for blood-related diseases and AIDS before they can officially get married. In the academe, language testing serves two important functions, namely as a source of information for making decisions within the context of educational programs and as indicators of abilities that are of interest in research on language (Bachman 2008). In the field of language testing, we test either language elements ( including phonology, vocabulary and grammar ) or language skills ( listening, speaking, reading and writing) (Heaton 1990). A test can have an effect on both learning and teaching and this is known as wash back or backwash ( McNamara , 2008 ; Alsadat ,2004 ; Prodromou, 1995 ). The wash back can be negative or positive depending on whether or not it promotes teaching and learning process. Hughes (2003) argues that “too often, language tests have a harmful effect on teaching and learning, and fail to measure whatever it is they are intended to measure”. In this paper, I will discuss Hughes comment in the light of my English learning experience. As a general layout, I will first describe the educational context of my English learning. Thereafter, I will describe the nature of the tests I used to take and along with the washback of each test. It is important to point out that the educational context is similar for all tests viz teachers college. My experience there prepared me to be an English teacher in the state schools. However, the nature of the tests were different which had an adverse effects that eventually influenced my English learning. The educational context is English department at teachers college in the small city of Hail, Saudi Arabia. The department aims to prepare undergraduates to serve as English teachers in the state schools. In the first and second academic year, the syllabus focus is on teaching language skills and language elements. Linguistics and Literature are taught in the third and fourth years. The course books prescribed for students are top-quality as they are published by reputable American and British companies. In fact, these materials are accredited and used by universities and colleges worldwide. Reading and writing are allotted four hours per week ; listening and speaking are allotted three hours per week in the first year and two hours per week in the second. The ministrys regulations prescribe that listening and speaking ought to be taught by native speakers with the aim that students should receive pure native input. Although the regulations prescribe native teachers for listening and speaking, it does not necessitate that he should be TESOL or TEFL certified. Thus , some teachers are archeology, sports, or even administration graduates teaching both listening and speaking skills to students. Obviously, such teachers ( although they are native speakers) lacked teaching skills as they were not prepared to handle English teaching. The speaking coursebook we used was Interaction Listening/Speaking published by Mcgraw-Hill Book company in the States. The book combines listening and speaking activities. The speaking and listening activities are authentic and include activities such as role-playing, dialogues , pictures and interviews. The methodology of teaching speaking followed by the teacher was boring and mundane. We did not engage in practice speaking in the class since the teacher monopolized the discussion. The class was mostly intrinsically writing-based as we were required to do the exercises in the coursebook. Besides writing, the teacher used to allocate a part of the class for a speaking activity. Apparently inexperienced, she asked every student to prepare a topic one chooses and stand before the student audience to talk about it for five minutes. This method only tests student’s memory but not proficiency in oral communication since it lacks spontaneity. Heaton (1990) points out that testing someones ability to speak is one of the most significant aspects of language testing. However, it is extremely a difficult skill to test as it is far too complex skill to allow a reliable analysis to be made for the purpose of objective testing. On the other hand, Flulcher (2003) claims that the purpose of speaking test is to collect evidence in a systematic way through elicitation techniques or tasks. Obviously, the most salient aim of any speaking test is to see whether or not a learner can produce oral input. This what makes speaking different from other language skills such as listening, reading, and writing. Ironically, the two speaking tests I had to take to pass the first semester were totally unrelated to measuring my speaking ability. The first one did not require producing oral utterances typical of speaking tests, whereas the second test did not require spontaneity which is a crucial speaking feature. During test, the tutor brought us a piece of paper containing a question on speaking. Basically, the question requires students , in full sentences, to describe a picture. In the picture , there are people sitting around a table. Students were asked to write sentences describing the people in the picture. Although, this sort of question elicits students output, this output is not spoken and hence should not be labeled as a speaking test. The second speaking test was meant to test students ability to speak in English for a couple of minutes. Before the exam day, the teacher gave us a list of topics and informed us that during the exam, we will be asked to talk about one topic out of the list. The topic will be chosen by the teacher. As I mentioned before,this kind of test is suitable to test rote memory and not speaking abilities. Before the test, I prepared for each topic and memorized lots of information on each topic. During the exam, when the teacher asked me to talk about a topic on the list, I was talking confidently and fast since I already memorized some sentences and had lots of information that I did not need to think of while speaking. As indicated beforehand, a backwash or a washback refers to the effect a test has on teaching and learning which can be either positive or negative. The two speaking tests already mentioned have had two harmful effects on my English speaking and failed to measure my speaking ability. These two potential effects were weakness in oral production and non-spontaneity. The speaking test which required me to describe a picture in sentences has led to a weakness in my ability to produce oral utterances. Of course the test was meant to measure my speaking ability but in fact it failed to do so. This type of test is labeled as “paper and pencil test”. In fact, Bachman (2008) argues that ( this test) is unlikely to be useful in a conversation class. This test more meaningful in measuring a learners ability in writing since it involves writing sentences. However, being able to produce written sentences does not guarantee ability in speaking. Although at the end I got a high grade, this is not an indication that I am a good speaker of English because I did not speak a word for that test! The second test which involved speaking for minutes has also had a negative washback. Although I talked orally for minutes, my speech was not spontaneous since the topics were already given to students by the teacher beforehand resulting in the failure of measuring my speaking ability as well. I came to the exam well-prepared and memorized sentences as well as information. Later on , it took me ages to get rid of this habit and to speak spontaneously resulting to planning what to say before saying it. This traditional way of teaching and testing speaking is still common in many parts of the world. Bizarrely, it is practiced by some native speaker teachers who mostly had no training in modern methodology. The wrong notion that speaking is just uttering sounds is behind the spread of this poor way of teaching and testing. As long as the speaker is not spontaneous when he speaks, we can assume that he already planned what to say and therefore it is not regarded as a natural pure speech. Listening is a principal skill. In both first language and second language, listening occupies a position more superior than other language skills. A person listens before he starts to speak ; more so, if a person is born with no listening ability, he will certainly be unable to speak. Testing listening comprehension underwent many changes lately due to the understanding of the processes involved in listening (Brown, 1990;Buck, 1988; Rost, 1990). The most notable shift was from a bottom-up process to a bottom-up top-down processes theory. Lewkowicz (1991) argues that : “listening is not just the consecutive processing of subskills starting from the lowest level to the highest. It requires processing at a number of different levels to which no fixed order can be attributed. The listener utilizes not only his knowledge of the language being spoken, that is, his knowledge of the morphemes, phonemes. lexis and syntax of the language, but also his knowledge of the outside world and how it relates to the topic at hand, as well as his interpretation of what has been said so far, in order to comprehend the message”. Those engaged in listening teaching and testing should cope with these changes. According to some researchers, testing learners ability to comprehend information should not be the sole aim of a listening test but also how to use the information they heard. In the next section, the nature of my listening text will be described. It will also be followed by the washback. The situation of listening is similar to speaking in the sense that the instructor of the subject is a native speaker of English. However, the two skills are taught and tested separately which is “ desirable as it is possible to develop listening ability much beyond the range of speaking ability if the practice material is not dependent on spoken responses or written experience” ( Heaton 1990 ) The listening test covered the following aspects: phoneme discrimination, stress and intonation, testing comprehension via visual materials, statement and dialogues , talks and lectures. From a language testing point of view, the test is good because it covered all aspects characteristic of a good listening test. However the test was not accompanied by any audio-machine like a tape-recorder. The teacher was reading the questions using his own voice. During reading some questions, he was interrupted unconsciously either by coughing or just clearing his throat. Moreover, some students were privileged. They were sitting round the teacher and were able to listen well. Others were sitting at the back, and due to the inconsistency of the teachers voice , they could not pick some of the questions fully. This resulted in questions being unanswered. However, although the test covered all aspects typical of a good listening test, there are many factors which really affected the validity and reliability of the test including the overall effects. First of all, it was not accompanied by a recorder . The teacher, relying on being a native speaker, used his own voice to read the test items. Modern methodologies in listening testing necessitate using an audio-machine when conducting the test. Although this becomes very crucial and necessary for non-native teachers, it is also of importance to native speaker teachers as well. Some native speakers accents are incomprehensible especially for new learners of English. The reason for using an audio-equipment is to insure a consistency in the voice when reading the test questions for students. Not utilizing an audio-equipment in testing listening will affect students responses to the test. For example, during my listening test that involved testing features like stress and intonation ( which involves consistency) the teacher s voice was not consistent , partly fast and partly slow. Furthermore, during reading the test items, he used to get interrupted by coughing and sneezing. Most importantly, students sitting at the back of the class were not able to listen very well since the voice was sometimes down. Heaton (1990) argues that if the quality of the voice producer is poor , the test is unreliable. No doubt that the listening test already mentioned has had negative implications for me. Although it was comprehensive, it failed to measure the listening ability. During the test, I was sitting far away from the teacher ; thus, I could not listen to the teacher reading the test items so I skipped some questions undone. Moreover, since the teacher was not using a tape-recorder, his voice was not consistent and this distracted me a good deal especially during testing stress and intonation. All these factors led me to score a low mark in the test. Reading is one of the four skills of a language. It is a complex skill as it involves decoding symbols for the purpose of deriving meaning. Compared to listening and speaking , little importance it has as a person can do his day-to-day activities with no recourse to reading. However, reading becomes more important than other skills as a person gets more educated . At this particular time, he might spend much time in reading than listening and speaking. Having discussed speaking and listening tests and their harmful effects, I will now move to another test which also had a harmful washback on my learning English. The test was a reading comprehension test and the education context is similar to speaking and listening except the teacher was not a native speaker of English. Lado (1962) points out that the general technique to test reading comprehension consists of presenting to the students passages containing reading problems and testing his comprehension of the passages precisely at those points at which the problems are crucial. My reading test did not go far beyond this definition. We have been given a reading passage containing problems and were tested on those problems. The reading passage was basically a short story and the questions were true/false , multiple choice ,completion items and so forth. However, the reading text itself was fairly inaccessible. The structure and lexis of which were beyond a freshmans competence. Whilst reading the text during the exam, I got stuck when I came across expressions which hindered me from absorbing the text. This was accompanied by a short time allocated for the test which was not sufficient. Kathleen and Kenji (1996) argues that choosing the text to test reading can have an impact on the results. It is useful to use a variety of texts , and they should reflect the goals of language teaching situation whether, for example, the intended language use will be academic or conversational. It must be recognized that background knowledge plays a part in comprehension, so that intended difficulty levels are not confused by the testees lack of familiarity with the context. As expected, the effect of the test was negative. Although the test questions were typical of a good reading test, the reading passage was quite hard that I could not even get the gist out of it. During regular reading classes, we were exposed to simple texts that were readable and understandable. We were not trained before on such a passage ;thus, the text was a real shock to me that I was not able to score a better mark. Writing is the most difficult skill since it entails familiarity with all aspects of language. It, at the same time ,entails cleverness since a good writer is the one who mingles language proficiency with language experience. Learners of English find writing a bit more difficult . Writing is not only stringing sentences to form paragraphs but also involves knowledge of a particular subject about which the learner is going to write. During a writing test, students are required either one paragraph or a multi-paragraph essay in a limited time. This becomes more difficult if the topic they are to write about is complex and beyond their language competence. In the next section, I will describe the nature of the my writing test , the tasks of the test and how it was conducted followed by the test washback. During the writing test, I was given a list containing various topics and was asked to go for one and write an essay about. The duration of the test was two hours. However, the topics offered on the list were tricky to even an advanced learner of English . First set, they involve general grounding in areas like medicine and technology which I am not familiar with. Since the topics are complicated , they are time-consuming. One of the topics on the list I can still remember was on cooling! The test has had a negative washback. Requiring beginners of learning English to write an essay about a subject they have little knowledge of does not measure the real aim of writing. The main drawbacks of the test were topics offered and time allotted. Needless to say that essay writing is a stage of writing beyond beginners level. Thus, beginners of English should be tested in topics familiar to them so that they will be able to write about. Second, time allotted for the test should mach the test level. Scott and Beard (1985) made the following quote regarding testing: “It goes without saying that tests and examinations—at the right time, in the right proportions—have a valuable contribution to make in assessing learners proficiency, progress, and achievement. As a device for diagnosing learners errors, and for defining the inter-language of individuals and groups of learners, they are indispensable. Tests are also the simplest and most effective form of extrinsic motivation, of imposing discipline on the most unruly class, and of ensuring attention as well as regular attendance because they are closely bound up with classroom authority No doubt that testing and assessment are crucial tools in language learning. Unfortunately, most of English teachers, including native speakers, are not well-equipped with language testing principals. Testing should be an important subject for every curriculum targeted at preparing students to be teachers. Introduction Educational Context Speaking Nature of The Test Test Backwash From Speaking to Listening Nature of The Test Test Washback From Listening to Reading Nature of The Test Test Washback From Reading to Writing Nature of The Test Test Washback Conclusion Read More