Opportunities to learn... ?

                       Factors such as the vision that Colombians have towards English, the conditions offered to teachers and students for  improving the language learning process  make the NBP (National Bilingual Plan) an idealistic project  that does not match with Colombian reality.  We know that for 2019 Colombians must be proficient English users in every level established by the MEN, but which opportunity does it offers to the low socioeconomic strata institutions? May be, it has provided teachers with training courses regarding teaching issues, but this is not offered to all of them, may be, it has made a change expanding school time for some minutes, but it has increased the amount of students per classroom, bringing as a side effect students’ lack of motivation.

            This governmental authority is almost making compulsory learning English for everybody and it is trying to implement new methods (above mentioned) to provide institutions with tools that permit to develop this plan satisfactorily, but are those new strategies fulfilling the expectations? Is the MEN providing opportunities for students to really learn a foreign language? Or is it just trying to accomplish international requisites to sell Colombian potential worldwide? Many questions arise when talking about MEN determinations concerning NBP, but here what made think out of the box were two aspects: equality and culture.

            In terms of equality, and based on what I have lived in my hometown, I would say that Colombia is a country where little attention is focused to small towns or marginalized areas, it is like if the government does not think that in those areas people with a lot of potential can be found, and it can be seen when just those changes to improve learning processes are made in big cities and capitals. I know that it also has to do with local administration but anyway I think that if the government sees that all the country needs to speak and understand English for business-related purposes, it must apply those changes to all schools, in this case the “autonomia institucional” is not helping to accomplish NBP objectives, How is it expected to achieve equal goals with same opportunities if institutions can do what they think is correct? We have to reword the expression “practice makes perfect” to “unity makes perfect”.

            Moreover, culture is another aspect that cannot be ignored when talking about NBP achievement. Frankly speaking and not generalizing, people have what they think, people are reluctant or not to the change depending on their background, and Colombia through its history has been a bad treated population, a nation that has always been under the thumbs of others and has acted as the obedient servant. A nation that is accustomed to ask for international help because it is not capable of solving its own mess, bearing in mind this, how does the government expect that institutions do what is correct without establishing general policies? What kind of psychological help is the government providing to Colombians? What kind of motivation is the government implementing to show Colombians that they do not have to beg for something that is a right as the equal and good quality education is?  We are not doing nothing, government is doing nothing, we can try to do better every day in our teaching practice, Colombians can work harder every day, but until we realize that what we have is not a gift but a natural right, this perception about globalization, the importance of learning foreign languages and bilingual plans will not become a matter of everybody’s concern.

Assessing Young Language Learners

There are many challenges for researches and many questions arise regarding how young second language learners learn, there can be many purposes of assessment as well as different procedures and experiences to share about this specific field. But one thing that seemed to me very important and that has been proven to be true thanks to my short teaching experience is that children need to be taught in relation to their world. At the age of 7 or even 8 they find non-sense those activities an expressions used when you are evaluating their process through tasks, for example if they find a strange word they immediately lost interest in such activity. Moreover, they do not respond to any word that is similar to their L1 and that do not have encountered at least once in their learning process, as stated by McKay (2006) “if children have never seen or talked about the sea or sandcastles, they may not be able to respond to the instructions in the input, regardless of the general language ability”. So for the sake of students’ good performance it is not recommendable to take them out of their boxes, it does not mean that we cannot provide them with different strategies to motivate them and new topics for them to learn, yes of course we can, but it might be under their comfort, they must not feel the pressure of that change by means of expanding their world. Moreover, I think That as an ethical fact it is beneficial for all the stakeholders that who teaches an specific level feels comfortable with the audience she/he is working for, working with children is not difficult but is a serious matter, I mean, whatever the reason, input, face, comment, opinion and sentiment that you as teacher have towards a child will define what the will do concerning his learning experience.

Designing an Appropiate Test

            After reading this chapter and clarifying some concepts about the different types of tests, I realized that an important step about designing an appropiate test was mentioned at a flash glance, and it was that tests must be designed depending on students preferred style.

            Through my teaching experience, I have had to deal with tests that had been problematic and time consuming while administering and grading. I have had my students standing up looking for my explanations to answer a type of task and when you have 27 more students doing the same, you say to yourself: this is just  “@&%#”

            As it is a student’s right to know what is going to be evaluated, (validity) it is also a teacher must to reduce negative wash back effect and to make students feel a little comfortable before and while taking a test. Therefore I have thought about some aspects to take into account before designing a test:

1. Ask ourselves if the kind of item types, tasks and respond formats are appropriated for our students
2. Apply a survey before the assessment period to help us know which kind of tasks and response formats students feel more secure o comfortable with.
3. To reduce the options that the students will probably come up in the survey. How? Since the very beginning provide like certain patterns on the activities. E.g. (true or false, short answers, matching )
4. If there were various options chosen by the students we can include different types of questions depending on the ones that got higher score in strategic use.

Why doing this is important?

1. As it is designed depending on student’s strengths it is very likely that they get good grades so students’ good test performance automatically will make the test reliable.
2.  Biases will be avoided.
3. We’ll enhance our professionalism and validity and reliability concepts.
4. Because of the time institutes give to the specifics courses sometimes topics are not assessable and  as we don’t want that time affect students’ scores and performance, determining appropiate item types, tasks and respond formats will make our final judgment a reliable decision.
5. As providing students with the tools to achieve a productive learning process is one of our main goals, designing tests based on their good test taking strategies is a way to achieve it.

    

Assessing reading

                I personally believe that, it is true, assessing extensive reading tests is very tough due to the fact that you can obtain different answers and perspectives you can obtain from your students; better not to take into account the possible answers but the structures and style your students use to express what they understood about the reading. I think that extensive reading is a habit that should be built in the classroom, despite the fact that it increases the rate of learning new vocabulary, and beyond this, when extensive reading is practiced along with the teaching English process, this it aslso helps students to understand certain words from the content and do not oblige them to know the exact meaning of it. Moreover, in extensive reading there exists material that is adapted depending on the reading level that students have. For example, beginners, pre-intermediate reader etc, also words appear many times along with the story or reading in order to have as many possible encounters with the learners, until it seems familiar. These kinds of texts also have determined the number of unknown words and are provided with pictures, but it also depends on the level of the reader. Apart from this interesting topic, extensive reading, I would like to add that not always you need to have your students write long papers to know if they understood the gist or the relevant information about a text. I mean, it can be simplified with impromptu reading and comprehension questions as well as true and false exercises which are the most accurate form of testing students’ reading comprehension. At this point, I would use note taking as a way of testing reading comprehension because the students had the opportunity to see the word and to interact with the different contexts this word can be used in, but, anyway, I want to be very clear when I say that time must be an important factor to take into account before administering the test.

Assessing Listening?

Good conversations start with good listening.

             This chapter really made me think about the listening tests I took in the English courses. I used to ask myself why they graded what we wrote in the answer sheet and the spelling mistakes, if it was our listening competences what were being assessed instead of our writing ones. They used to grade our note taking style, and this very often made crazy because, I mean, not everybody takes notes in the same way, and not everybody needs to take notes to answer questions. Now I see that this complaint was not completely out of place. I agree with the idea that the skills might be integrated to assess one, this is obvious, you cannot even write a paragraph without first, having instructions read or listened. Also it seems to me that it is possible to assess the listening skill using the comprehension competence through the speaking skill and the information transfer with visual representations.

             From my personal experience it is easier to listen and answer a question orally despite the fact that I can look for synonyms and paraphrase what I am supposed to answer rather than writing exactly what I have heard under pressure knowing that the person who is talking, talks faster than what I can write. This is frustrating when you see that your note taking influences your performance in the process of taking a listening test. Moreover, I think that these two skills, listening and speaking are naturally correlated. By this I mean that listening and speaking occurs on the spot, it does not matter if you listened or spoke incorrectly or not, the fact is that you always do it instantly and the time to think is reduced. A person is never going to repeat more than three times what they have said, and you are not going to correct yourself more than three times while speaking. But, if you are writing or reading you have to read until you understand what is needed and write until your text reaches some kind of perfection.

            In conclusion, it can be said that, the way we use every skill to assess another one, go hand in hand with the strengths or difficulties our students face. Also, it is difficult to notice what those strengths and weaknesses are because of the external factors that are always present in students’ life. But what really matters, is that we are trying to be accurate at the time of making decisions about how and with which other skill the assessment should be combined. It was clearly stated by Brown (2004) “When you propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s competences, but you observe that person’s performance”.

Assessment, Evaluation & Grading

      From my personal point of view, assessment and evaluation are alike terms that make reference to the companion we as teacher bring to students in the learning process. For example in my experience, I ask my students if they are following me in any explanation or activity we are in, and if it is not happening then different kinds of explanation I must provide to clarify their doubts. Obviously, it is not always about providing different kinds of explanations but sometimes it concerns the way I approach the topic. While reading those documents, I realized that the evaluation or assessment I do while teaching, are composed with the three components stated in the readings. First, I gather information about what is making students’ life difficult. Then, I analyze what is going wrong and finally I decide what I should do to make things go in the right track. When this process finally takes a positive turn, it means when students have understood what is needed, I proceed to grade what they have done throughout the process.