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. 

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2015/session/uncertain-and-approximate-business-why-teachers-should-love-testing

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