Assessing, Listening
Listening is
a commonly avoided skill in English classes. It is frequent to see vocabulary
and grammar classes where students in lower grades have to find out the meaning
of a list of words, and those of higher grades transcribe some grammar rules
written on the board. Then, listening does not have any chance in some classes.
As it is
viewed -as the other skills- in a separated way, it is thought that it requires
a lot of work due to the artifacts and the appropriate material to work on it. However,
as could be seen in this chapter, there are four types of listening activities
that we can gradually implement to improve this skill in our students and at
the end, have multiple measures in their performances where we could assess
their English competence.
This is
another important aspect we must take into account. “Multiple measures will always give you a more reliable and valid
assessment than a single measure”; if we want to be objective and fair, it
is necessary that learning takes place as a process. I would like to share this case: A couple of
months ago a biology and ethics’ teacher of my school, was absent for about one
month because she had a motorbike accident. She evaluated the third period of a
seventh grade group with only one exam. Just one girl passed their subjects;
the rest of the group had grades between 1.0 and 2.0. As you could imagine,
parents, students and the other teachers were very upset with her “decisions”. At the end of the academic year, 23 students
failed biology and 21 ethics; 21 failed seventh grade due in greater extent to
her. How could be learning successful if we, as teachers, do not explore knowledge
taking into account different factors? How can a student want to go to school
if teachers do not show that students’ learning and students’ needs are
important?
Returning
to our subject, the tasks and activities we can use to improve this skill, if
they are implemented in a creative way and using interesting topics and
materials, could attract the students’ attention, since English classes offer
the possibility to learn with innovative materials, through inspiring and subjective
themes.
At school,
we must create our own material, flashcards, worksheets, exams, and why not, records.
Today there are a lot of programs and resources to make it possible. This is our
challenge as well as to try to integrate all the skills, and to generate enough
sceneries and moments where students can learn and we can triangulate their performances
to asses them.
To finish
my intervention here, some teachers would say: “A mí no me pagan por hacer
amigos y menos por pasar a todo el mundo”, that’s true, but our work in our
country is a social commitment; we decide if we want to be conformist hated
people, or change the reality offering true environments of learning.
