Information collection & exchange

Assignment
To draw a strip cartoon of the Miguel and Jose story, and to put the following 
sentences in the speech balloons: 
 
Which one is my sister/mine? 
 
This little one is yours. 
 
This big one is yours. 
 
No, this one is his sister/his. 
 
This isn't our baby/ours. 
 
My mother wants her baby/hers. 
 
My mother and father knew their baby/theirs. 
 
 Summary of guidelines for planning lessons 
• Build in student success by setting achievable objectives. 
• Provide input before expecting output. 
• Provide needed vocabulary. 

---

• Teach all four language skills. 
• Provide a variety of activities. 
• Allow for absorption time of new materials. 
• Teach from known to unknown. 
• Cover the syllabus. 
 Guidelines for testing 
This section looks at two aspects of testing: classroom tests and national examinations. These national 
examinations are usually set by the Ministry of Education. Practices vary, but in most countries the two most 
important national examinations are at the end of six years of primary school, and at the end of six years of 
secondary school. 
 Classroom Tests 
The first and most important principle in writing tests is to test what you have taught. What you teach should 
in turn reflect your long-term goals for your course. In this way, tests check your ability to keep to your long-
term goals and to transform those goals into lessons. 
While the emphasis may vary, in most situations you will be teaching all four language skills. Your tests 
should be devised to test these four skills. While testing reading, writing, and listening is relatively straight 
forward, the testing of speaking, particularly with classes of 50 and over, requires a little organization. 
The Royal Society of Arts Examinations Board in England has developed a format which can be adapted to 
meet your needs. First, divide your class into groups of threes. Then give each group approximately five 
minutes in which to prepare a task. An example of a task is: 
The teacher is going to visit your village for a week. Ask the teacher some questions about her plans. The 
teacher will ask you some questions about your village. 
Another example would be to give a group a picture or photo of a recent school activity? such as weeding 
the school garden, the official opening of the school fish pond, or the winning of a sports event, and to ask 
the three interviewees to talk about the picture. 
Then interview the group of three for approximately five minutes. If possible work with another teacher on 
these interviews, so that while your colleague is interviewing you can assess and take notes on student 
performances. If no other teacher is available, you could record these interviews to play back and assess 
later. It is also important that the interviewer make sure that each of the three interviewees is given 
opportunities to speak. 
When writing long tests, make sure that you sequence test items from easy to more difficult. Students 
suffering from test anxiety could be completely unnerved if the first questions they read seem beyond their 
capabilities. This sequencing of your test items could be done by first asking your students to fill in blanks or 
answer multiple-choice questions, then by including test items which require your students to write sentence 
answers, and finally by moving on to test items which involve writing paragraph answers. 
Make your directions clear. In a classroom test you may want to check orally that students have understood 
the directions. Many Volunteers report that in moments of panic students misread directions and fail tests 
because of this. The sound of your voice reading the directions slowly and clearly can be calming. 
Knowing the anxieties that surround tests, help your students by developing their review practices. The 
ideas discussed in Chapter Five, particularly the section on reading for academic purposes and the 
exercises to develop reading microskills, lend themselves well to the development of review practices. 
Figure 8.2 outlines some basic examination strategies for your students. The most important of these 
strategies revolves around a planned use of time. When giving classroom tests, tell your students at regular 
intervals how much time has passed and how much time they have left to complete the test. 

---

To get full benefit from the learning experience of tests, take time to go over corrected tests with your class. 
The advantages in this for your students generally outweigh the inevitable discussions over grades which 
some students will raise. You can control this situation by setting aside 10 minutes at the end of the session 
for questions on grades. Clearly though, you will need to think through and explain your grading policy to 
your classes well in advance. It also behooves you to familiarize yourself with the grading system of your 
colleagues. The American system tends to be more generous in its allocation of points than other systems, 
and you may wish to adjust so as to be more in tune with local expectations. 
For your own benefit, particularly when working with large numbers of students, make your tests easy to 
grade. Essay tests may be easy to prepare, but they take a long time to grade. So unless the essay format is 
required by the school, choose testing exercises such as multiple choice, completion, and cloze. The cloze 
test consists of giving students a passage to complete in which every nth word is deleted. However, you 
need not keep rigidly to a set pattern of deleting blanks when writing craze tests for your students. Here is an 
example of a cloze test. (When given, the words in parentheses are omitted.)