49th IATEFL Conference and Exhibition: Session by Jeremy Harmer ‘’An uncertain or approximate business: why teachers should love testing?’’
Little needs to be said about
Jeremy Harmer whose book ‘’The practice of English Language Teaching’’
by Pearson (already in its 5th revised edition which is being
launched at the IATEFL exhibition) has seen most of us through our training and
has stayed with us as a reference book. Lively and larger than life, Jeremy,
Good Will Ambassador for IATEFL, took it upon himself to take us back to the
basic question regarding how teachers feel about testing and why.
Testing: a hot potato
Harmer referred to testing as a big, life-hot issue and mentioned a
training session of his during which he gave participants the following quote
“Language tests do more harm than good’’
Then he asked people to stand on
opposites sides of the room based on what their feelings were towards the
quote. He described that lots of people stood on either side but also lots of
them were in the middle as the issue of testing perplexes teachers. The reason
for this confusion is that there are strong arguments both for and against testing.
Arguments against testing
On the one hand, it is argued that tests do not measure a number of
skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, resilience, curiosity
and leadership to mention but a few.
Therefore, they tend to measure what can be easily translated into
numbers. Harmer quoted Chomsky and his anathema to standardized tests which do
not seem to be geared towards the valuable but only ranks students. Looking
into the new UK trend of baseline tests (tests taken by pre-schoolers on entering primary school),
Harmer quoted writer Philip Pullman who said that testing so early on feels bizarre
when what we should be doing is teaching
those children how to learn and play. Harmer maintained that tests like these do
not take into account the different rate at which children learn and
they tend to disadvantage boys because of the different kinds of development
rate, an issue which becomes even more important when we factor in that the
child’s date of birth, a totally arbitrary characteristic, is closely linked to
when this child starts school.
Harmer went on to point on that testing can be intrusive to learning and
he quoted Einstein.
“Everybody is a genius but if
you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tress, it will live its whole life
believing it is stupid.’’
A quote which points out that the different abilities and learning
styles of the learners cannot be reflected via mainstream, standardized tests.
This was closely related with the next point about tests being snapshots
of learners’ performance. Harmer wondered whether these snapshots can
be accurate reflections of the true competencies of the learners which can be interpreted
in a more general scale. At this point I felt that Harmer’s session touched on
an aspect that Professor Freeman also addressed in his plenary session about
general proficiency and whether test results can have a transferable value which
reveals the general language proficiency of the learners.
Arguments to support testing
To keep his arguments balanced
on this intensely divisive topic, Harmer was quick to list why tests are needed in education. First of
all, he mentioned that tests offer us a rich insight into what our
learners know or what they are struggling with. Despite the teachers’
expert gut feeling and the fact that they know before testing their learners’ abilities,
formal
tests results are what our students and their parents want and need.
Formal examinations are needed to ensure,
although sometimes they might fail to point out some issues the candidates
have, that professionals know what they are doing and will do no harm
because of their lack of knowledge. Therefore, students will always be asked to
prove themselves and their skills through standardized exams and formal tests.
Harmer also referred to tests as a motivating factor and mentioned the
following quote from the Pearson Signature Event
“If you’ve got the
goal to aim for, you go for the goal.’’
to point out
that tests and exams are motivating factors which make learners study harder.
Finally, Harmer pointed out that tests are getting better and better
as they provide a wider range of tasks (other than just lists of multiple
choice questions) and are more learner- friendly.
‘’Testing isn’t going away!’’
Harmer summarized his arguments by saying that no matter how many
shortcomings we think tests have, they aren’t going away. Therefore, teachers
need to learn how to create better tests. Terms like construct and content
validity and reliability should not just be empty meaningless words for
teachers. We ought to make meaningful test-design an integral part of our
teacher education and continuous professional development. Teachers also need
to study the CEFR and the new Global Scale of English by Pearson
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/cadre1_en.asp
http://www.english.com/gse
in detail to get to understand what the descriptors mean and how these
relate to classroom teaching. Finally, teachers have to work out ways to make
boring tests fun to teach. Practising for exams should be cognitively
challenging and teachers are the ones who can add some flair to it. By
innovating our way of teaching exam candidates we make the whole process more
enjoyable and therefore more meaningful and enriching. In order to accomplish
that we need to focus less on the test and more on meaning itself. According to
Harmer, as teachers we need to make testing a student issue, not a teacher
issue. For this reason, we need to get the student to become actively engaged
in deciding on their own exam goals. We can also get them to write their own
tests or design their revision cards. It is the classroom teaching which makes
studying for exams passive or active and the teachers can make this crucial
decision.
‘’It’s up to us!’’
Harmer pointed out that if we want to change the testing culture in
our country or institution, we can either keep moaning and suffer or get active
and actually change things. Harmer summarized his session by saying that
whether we like it or not, testing is not going away so it’s up to us to decide
how to put to use.
Σχόλια
Δημοσίευση σχολίου