I’m very grateful to Simone Luttert for being the first to volunteer her paper. She addresses the difficulty of assessing learners‘ oral language production in an objective and principled way, proposing an evaluative grid that is to help teachers put the RLP’s desideratum of basing assessment primarily on communicative success into practice.
EdLing@fu
Educational Linguistics at Freie Universität
Dear all,
I’ve read the paper „Sprechprüfungen im Englischunterricht. Vorschlag für ein verlässliches und handliches Bewertungsmittel“. I really like the idea expressed with regards to pronunciation, saying that many students are capable of expressing themselves in a comprehensible and efficient manner although only few actually reach the standard of a native speaker. When I went to school, I remember many fellow students saying that they were ashamed of their accents. They thought that only a „real“ British or American accent would suffice for being considered a good student of the English language. Thus, if teachers explained to their students that comprehensibility and efficiency were the important factors generally and witch regards to achieving good results, students would feel more at ease and less self-conscious when speaking English.
Although I like the raster, I fear that many parents might be upset with it. Let’s imagine student A walks into the classroom, and only student A and the teacher are present. The teacher evaluates according to the raster, and, unfortunately, student A gets a 4- for his/her overall performance. If student A, then, would go on and say that the teacher evaluated his/her performance unjustly, what evidence does the teacher really have of student A’s performance? Only if there is at least another teacher present, one can say that the grade is not a result of one single teacher (who could potentially grade unjustly). So this is what I am asking: Is there any way one can somehow „hold on“ to a student’s performance, so the teacher, the student, and, perhaps, the parents could look at it together and talk about it?
Lastly, I would like to know if this paper (and especially the raster) was sent to the authorities as a proposal? If so, what’s their reaction?
I would really like to hear more about this. I’ll be a teacher myself; it is important that we care.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Regards
Jeffrey
Dear Jeffrey,
The grid proposed is supposed to be an aid to teachers, helping them to grade more objectively and to be able to justify their decisions to themselves and others if need be, whether they’re alone with their examinee or not. This is a lot better than arriving at a grade by gut feeling, so I don’t see how anyone could be upset about it. Of course, we still need to be able to trust teachers to use it fairly. (Sorry, the responsibility is not taken away from you. 🙂 ) The grid is not supposed to be a check on teachers, but a tool for them.
You’re right of course, in an ideal world, there would always be multiple raters, but that’s a different story. I’ve worked at private language schools where they couldn’t even afford — or so they said — to send in a second person to protocol. All that they wanted from me was a single number, and had the student — who had put down some money for the exam — felt that the number was unjust, there would have been no way to reconstruct what had gone on in the room. But. Had I had the grid, I might have felt better deciding on the number in the first place. 🙂