3206. How to Be Great at Exams


 
We second or foreign language teachers should test our students’ communicative competence.
I would advise you to test speaking along lessons, while the other three language skills (listening, reading and writing) can be assessed and tested at regular written tests.
However we should test these three latter skills also along the school year lessons and not only at written tests. What I propose is a continuous testing and assessing, and not only confined to written tests at each “evaluation” or term – I also would propose five (or four) “evaluations” plus the final testing. Only three “evaluations” seem little to me.
The communicative competence should be tested more often. As well remember that our students should not find the test activities unexpected: those activities should have been worked out along the lessons too.
I could carry on by writing about all this testing thing, but what can we do to minimize our students’ anxiety at final tests and at regular tests? Right away with frequent testing and assessing: in that way our students will bear in mind that those punctual tests are not the only ones from which their grades are depending…
I can tell you, from my experience by testing kids that they did not get anxious nor nervous, or not too much. At tutoring sessions I did not find much nervousness near their exams. Precisely all those tutoring sessions were also useful for the kids to give vents to their suffering, if any; well sometimes normal students could feel suffering or conflicts at certain times of their lives.
Those tutoring sessions made up a nice relationship between teachers and students. By conducting so you in some way made friends or something similar with most of the boys. It was nice. / Photo from: chess-player PaperTo Store. Kids can be so great!

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