Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Public examinations
The public examination system tends to vary from country to
country. One of the tasks which every teacher has when he
takes up an appointment in a new country is to discover just
what the requirements of the public examination system are.
He needs to obtain copies of syllabuses, past papers,
regulations, and the reports of the examiners, where these
are published, and to familiarise himself with them. From
this he should be able to discover what real linguistic skills
are required of examination candidates and what kinds of
examination techniques they will need to have mastered. It is
then possible to concentrate substantially on teaching the
language skills and, in about the last one-tenth of the course,
to teach the necessary techniques for passing the
examination. Most teachers devote far too much time to
practice examinations—pupils often seem to like it, but it is
rarely in their best interests since many good examining
techniques do little to foster greater learning—dictation is a
good case in point. For information about the public
examinations most widely taken in Britain, one can do little
better than consult J.McClafferty’s A Guide to Examinations
in English for Foreign Students. In this there are useful hints
on preparing for the examinations, details of the various
examinations offered by the boards and summaries of
regulations and entry requirements. It covers the
examinations of the Cambridge Local Examination
Syndicate, the Royal Society of Arts, the London Chamber of
Commerce, and the ARELS Oral Examination, and has a
supplementary list of other examinations in English for
foreign students—altogether a very helpful document. Much
of the preliminary investigatory work suggested in the
previous paragraph has been done for the teacher by this
book, there remains only the task of analysing past papers
and consulting the annual reports of the examiners.
There are a number of types of examination or methods of
assessment which have not been discussed at all in this
chapter but which a teacher may come across from time to
time. One of these is assessment by using a structured
interview schedule. Here the test takes the form of an
interview and the linguistic tasks demanded of the candidate

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Assessment and Examinations
165
are progressively elaborated according to a fixed
programme. The point at which the candidate begins to fail
in these tasks gives him a rating on the schedule. Such
examinations are usually entirely oral—though clearly there
is no absolute necessity that they should be so—and the
rating is usually arrived at by subjective judgment against a
fairly detailed specification of performance features,
sometimes by a panel of judges. Another type of test is that
involving simultaneous translation—usually reserved for
assessing interpreters—but there are a number of such
techniques and it is wise to keep an open mind towards them
for they might well turn out to be useful some day.
The final word is—avoid too much assessment; resist pres-
sures which might make examinations dominate teaching.