Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (41 page)

third conditional

This tense is used exclusively to talk about the past. You use it to express regrets and imagine how things would be if something different had happened.

The third conditional is probably the most difficult structure your students have to learn. You only teach it to upper-intermediate and advanced learners.

The basic structure is: ‘If’
plus a verb in past perfect tense, the subject followed by ‘would have’ plus a past participle verb:

If
I had known the shop was closed,
I would not have
come.

If
you hadn’t studied languages, what
would you have
done instead?

If
I had been born poor, I think my life
would still have
been happy.

You can also use past perfect continuous tense in the ‘if’ clause and the present perfect continuous form after ‘would’
in the other clause:
If
I had been wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident, I
wouldn’t
have been
so badly injured.

If
you had known I was coming, you
would have been
wearing your suit.

One way to practise this structure is by making excuses.

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Put students in pairs and have one student accuse the other of doing something and the other can apologise with an excuse. You just need to provide the students with the situations. For example, students discussing a football match may have a dialogue like this:

Pierre: You arrived late for the game! I’m so annoyed.

Valerie: I’m sorry but if you had given me the right directions, I would have been on time.

Pierre: But you didn’t bring my boots.

Valerie: I’m afraid if you had left your boots in the usual place, I would have been able to find them.

Pierre: You don’t understand! I couldn’t play!

Valerie: Don’t worry! Even if you’d played, the team would have lost. The score was 12-0.

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Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It

Part V

What Kind of Class

Will I Have?

In this part . . .

Wondering what the experience of dealing with

students is like? Wondering how to assess their

aptitude and the difference you’re making to them along

the way? Wonder no more. This part gives you an in-depth

guide to assessment, the many types of courses you may

become involved with and, most importantly, the sorts of

students you’ll find yourself face-to-face with. I cover the differences between classes where every student speaks

the same language and those where you have as many

different mother tongues as speakers.

I also lead you through the intricacies of one-to-one

teaching, working with younger students and how to

teach specific types of English – English for business, for

example – with ease and efficiency.

Chapter 18

Putting Students to the Test

In This Chapter

▶ Finding out what your students need

▶ Discovering the best course for students

▶ Grading tests

▶ Considering alternatives to testing

The word ‘test’ tends to evoke fear in most students, but as a teacher, tests help you gather loads of information that enable you to keep your students happy and progressing.

Testing is useful before students get started so you know what kind of course to enrol them on, but you can also use tests along the way to check progress and find out if the course was successful in meeting objectives.

Testing Early to Discover

Your Students’ Needs

When a student makes an inquiry about a course, schools and individual teachers see pound signs flash before their eyes. In reality though, the pounds only materialise if you can you deliver the course the student needs.

So you start off by checking what she knows and what she needs. I cover the various ways of doing this in the next sections.

Having them test themselves

One kind of test that’s really useful for giving you a head start before you even meet the student, is a
self-assessment test
in which you get the student to analyse how good she is at various aspects of the language, usually by rating herself from 1-5 or by completing sentences.

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Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?

Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘If the student can’t speak English, how can she complete the test?’ Well, if all your students come from the same language base, you can fairly easily organise a test in their mother tongue.

You can make the test visual by using pictures of different situations in which they may use English (listening to lectures, using the phone and so on) and ask students how comfortable they are in those situations. Rating systems with smiley faces and frowning faces help to convey the point. Set the test out so that it goes from really easy to gradually more difficult and the students can stop when the questions get too tough.

You can engineer your test to cover areas such as:

✓

Grammar
by offering a ‘complete the sentence’ exercise such as: ‘If I improved my English, I . . .’.

With this question, you can test whether the student knows how to make a sentence in the second conditional and you can find out a bit about that person’s motivation for taking a course at the same time.

If the test contains very direct questions the student is likely to copy from a grammar reference book. It works better when you sneak in the tenses by asking about things you want to know about the student and stating that she should reply with a complete sentence. For example, to test the past simple tense ask:

When was the last time you studied English? Describe your lessons.

✓

Vocabulary
knowledge centres around the dictionary, so ask something like:

When you talk about the following topics, how often do you use your dictionary?

• Family and friends: a little quite a lot often

• My job: a little quite a lot often

• My hobbies and interests: a little quite a lot often

• Shopping: a little quite a lot often

✓

Reading
skills depend on comprehension, so ask questions such as:

What do you usually read in English? Say how easy or difficult it is to understand.

✓

Writing
includes spelling and formats, so present a scale from 1 to 5

where 1 is bad and 5 is excellent, and have students rate their abilities on questions such as:

• How good is your spelling in English?

1 2 3 4 5

• Can you write formal letters?

1 2 3 4 5

• Can you write informal letters?

1 2 3 4 5

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267

✓

Speaking
is a matter of being understood, so ask something along the lines of:

My customers usually understand me. Yes No

✓

Listening
is another test of comprehension. Give students the 1 to 5

scale again and ask how well they understand the person speaking in various situations:

• Telephone calls:

1 2 3 4 5

• Presentations:

1 2 3 4 5

• Colleagues chatting in the office:

1 2 3 4 5

You can also find out why students are taking the class by having them fill in a sentence like: I need to study English because . . . Ask them also whether they prefer to study in a class of students or alone and to explain why. The answers that students give help the school or teacher to put students in the right kind of course or to design and sell the courses better.

Assigning levels through placement tests

Rather than designing a course for a student’s specific purposes, schools and colleges usually have placements tests so that they can match a student to a course already on offer or planned. In terms of general English, most offer six levels ranging from beginner to advanced and which I talk about in Chapter 4.

Proficiency level
is absolutely the highest level, but courses at this level are quite rare. Even beginner and advanced level courses are sometimes tricky to fill. So, before the term begins, or if your school offers continuous enrolment, before you place a student in an existing course, the school has to establish the student’s overall level.

Speaking and listening testing

Some establishments offer each student an interview with a teacher, which is basically a test. It’s really time consuming to do this but at least you can get a real view of the student’s speaking ability, which is the key language skill for most people. Of course, listening is involved too as you interact with the student. You can also take the opportunity to plug the school’s facilities and put the student at her ease because the test happens more informally. For example, to try a past simple check question, you casually ask: ‘How did you get here today? Did it take long?’

For an interview to be really effective, let everyone in the room introduce themselves. You may have a second teacher who doesn’t speak and just assesses, although this makes students more nervous. Explain what’s going to happen, personalise the questions if possible and give each student some feedback at the end.

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Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?

Assessing through the written words

Written placement tests are very common too. They allow a school to test a whole coach load of new students all at the same time, providing there’s space. At the end you also have a written record to keep in students’ files.

One of the disadvantages of written tests compared with oral ones is that students complain about the results of written tests far more and often ask for another go.

In written tests, students tend to cheat a lot and have warped results because of the pressure of the situation. It’s fairly rare that someone in the school can find time to watch a student take the test so the student is likely to sneak a look at the dictionary or ask a friend for help. Sometimes students don’t understand the instructions but this only becomes evident later when the marker notices how badly they messed things up.

On the other hand, you can buy published tests or select a section from the course books for each level to form the test. It’s possible to include reading passages but it’s best not to make the test appear too long and intimidating.

Tests like these should have an easy marking system, usually an answer key, to cut down on administration.

If the school offers exam classes, use questions from past papers to give the students a realistic example of what the exam is like and an idea of how the students measure up to specific exam skills.

Testing for proficiency

Proficiency tests aren’t the same as the proficiency level in English, which follows advanced level. A
proficiency test
assesses a student’s ability to perform a particular task or tasks that she’ll have to accomplish in the future.

So if your student tells you that she’s been offered a great job in a restaurant on the condition that her English is up to scratch, you can design a test that covers taking orders and handing complaints. It doesn’t really matter whether the student has taken a course before or whether she knows their grammar. You simply need to know how well she may be able to handle that job.

Testing to Establish the Best Course

Once your students are actually enrolled on a course you can continue to use tests to map their progress and measure what you’ve all achieved.

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Testing progress

If a course is of a specific length you can build in one or two progress tests at various stages. Progress tests serve a few purposes:

✓

Providing motivation for the students to study.
Targets and deadlines help some people to get themselves in gear, but for others they can be stressful and de-motivating. You need to decide how to present your test so that you strike the right balance.

✓

Providing a standard level for the class so that students can be
changed to a different course that better matches their proficiency
level if necessary.
Students sometimes ask to be moved up to a higher level and if you, as the teacher, aren’t too keen, the results of the progress test may be the basis on which you decide. Likewise if you have to move a student down, you can use the test as evidence for your decision.

✓

Highlighting gaps in your teaching – or the course materials – that
you need to fill
. This can be for your own purposes or for the school to monitor its teachers. The danger of this is that you may end up training your class to pass the test rather than teaching them English.