3001. Communication from The First Class-Day!


 
Today I implemented the placement test for our new adult students, for me to find out about their level of English, and place them into the corresponding group-class. Also there were veteran adult students for whom I wanted to assess their level after the long summer break.
What I intend to explain and remark here on this post is that the main point about the exam was that I wanted to assess their communicative writing competence. I suppose that we foreign-language teachers should foster and boost and enhance our students’ communicative competence, because we teach English for communication sake: these marvelous grown-ups are used to traveling and at those trips they have got to use English to “survive” in different countries where their English will be very convenient and necessary indeed.
Well, I set the test today and this evening I will have to have a look at their test sheets. This school year I set three exercises within the test: one about vocabulary – both easy and advanced level lexis –, one exercise where they had got to use one word from that first exercise, by writing a sentence with it, plus a final exercise where they had got to write about their city, namely Granada, in approximately 100 words, by telling whatever they wanted to say about that city, where we live.
Most of the students I guess have written about Granada’s beautiful monuments and landscape.
As I said the main point was to set communication between them and me. So as to finish I shall say that also the main point with this test is to place our students into three levels: false beginners, intermediates and advanced.
When you read those tests, typically you easily find out whether the students have one of those three levels. Tests should provide one more chance to establish communication! / Photo from: Alhambra-de-Granada. This is Alhambra palace, one of the inspiring monuments of Granada, the city where we live.

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