3645. How to Build Up Practical Tests and Exams

 It seems that a communicative approach to teaching/learning a second or foreign language may be the best, and actually most teachers apply it in the classroom. 

Thus the learners would learn and acquire that language by communicating in the target tongue, and also they would learn that language in order to communicate both in and out of the classroom. 

As well their dear teacher would not confine the classes to giving language facts but to communication (plus language facts, if you wish, of course - they are necessary). 

Okay. 

However, that teacher cannot confine the tests and exams to measure grammar learning and other language facts. 

If the classes were communication, the stuff measured at those tests and exams has to be also communicative. A few questions can be devoted to grammar, anyway, but also in accordance to what already done in class. 

The students shouldn’t encounter questions in the tests which they haven’t been trained for. 

Otherwise those students have to be assessed about what done in class. 

When I taught kids, some twenty years ago, I used to include at least one exercise that consisted of writing an essay, for example a story – a short one – about something or with some given elements. And then my teaching English was not very communicative. Some stories were really good.

Tests should be thus practical and communicative. 

Also I can remember the first test or exam I set when I began to teach kids, nearly thirty years ago. Well, that exam had a series of questions which demanded from the kids – they were some twelve years old – some strategies a student can have at college, but not at secondary education! 

The results were a terrible failure, and even kids who used to get good grades, had gotten fails, and some parents protested bitterly. 

The exam or test is kind of one more class exercise, always being educative and signifying one more step in the students’ progress at learning the second or foreign language. You may also include questions about grammar, yet in the same way as you all have worked in class. Have a nice day and a nice back to school.

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