A letter to the teachers of English: 33Test what you teach (2) [Archives:2003/690/Education]

Dr..M.N.K.Bose ([email protected])
Associate Professor of English,
Faculty of Arts, Ibb.
Dear Fellow teachers,
This is my second letter in this series; in the first letter I told you about how teaching and testing should be related to each other and in this letter I will say something more about this interrelationship. I have said that the test items should be similar and not the same as the exercises that you use in the classes. But, in some of the common examination question papers that we studied, we found that the exercises given in the Workbooks had been reproduced exactly without any change. What can such items test except the memory of the students? Is testing memory our objective of testing? I suppose not. Testing our students’ understanding should be our objective, if the tests are to be valid and useful. That is why we should see that the test items are not a mere repetition of the workbook exercises. Even a small change will do; for example, the following test item is the modified form of the exercise in CECY (Crescent English Course for Yemen)Workbook 1 (p.50):
Fill up the blanks with the suitable alternative.
d? or dr? ——-awing ——-own ———ay ———um ——ance
Similarly, the following can be a test item, which is a modified form of the exercise in CECY Workbook 4 (p.18):
Make a request beginning with ‘Would you mind….?’ to suit each of these situations:
1. You are going to Sana’a with your brother. Your brother is sick and wants to sit in the front seat in the taxi. There is someone sitting there. Ask him to take another seat.
2. You want change for a 100-riyal bill for paying 50 riyals to the fruit seller. Ask the shopkeeper for two 50-riyal bills.
You can increase the challenge level of the test items making more differences between the exercise and the item; it will be possible that some of the exercises are left undone for want of time and these exercises can be used as test items, in case you don’t have much time to spend on setting test items. The point I am driving home is that there is no point in reproducing the exercises that the students have already done as test items in the question papers.
It is also important that you set the questions carefully. I have seen teachers setting questions while they are traveling in a taxi between their homes and the colleges, or while waiting in the staff room between classes. Most often these question papers are 4 or 5 sentence question papers, asking the students to trace the character of some person or elucidate the theme of a poem or sketch the character of some one or summarize a chapter in a novel. These question papers give room for the students to guess the questions in advance and the tests are often a ritual rather than an occasion to get good feedback. Moreover, they fail to test the understanding of the students, testing only their memory, and enable the ‘memory machines’ to score high marks. These high scorers often do miserably badly when they face proficiency tests, which test the language competence in real life situations.
Let’s realize that tests are an occasion for us and our students to look back at what we have done and if we have done it satisfactorily.
Yours fraternally,
Dr.M.N.K.Bose
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