Learners feel happy at school when they feel their importance at school. Learners with good and excellent academic competency are lucky with this respect, but what about those who have an average academic competency, who are not so quick witted, who are unable to show very good results at different exams or subject Olympiads? I have observed that such learners are usually more reliable at carrying out long term projects like bees making honey, when the output is the result of everyday accurate work, and when the project is completed they feel as happy as especially gifted learners having won the first prize at a subject Olympiad. In my previous entry I wrote about our new English teaching project “Armenian Culture in English”. Now I want to speak about another project which I am conducting at our school with the members of our school English speaking club. We are compiling a pictorial electronic English-Armenian school dictionary. The first part of our dictionary has already been completed and it is on our school media library site:
http://gradaran.mskh.am/node/9363 I took the idea of this dictionary from “The Oxford Duden Pictorial English Dictionary”. Our newly compiled dictionary already serves as a good reference book for our media library visitors.
We Shouldn't Idolize Marks in Figures for Assessment
In her today’s entry Gayaneh has expressed her concern about her students’ cheating while doing their tests. I have already solved this problem and would like to share my experience about this important issue. Learners will always try to cheat their teachers unless teachers stop idolizing figure marks for the evaluation of their learners’ knowledge and skills. I myself have already solved this problem by changing my methods of evaluation, and I am not the initiator of this change. The initiator of this change is definitely “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages”, particularly Table 2 Self Assessment Grid (p32) and the Dialang Scales (p.287). Having these as a general sample I have worked out three-level qualitative demands for learners’ language competency at elementary, middle and high schools. I use these demands while assessing my learners’ language knowledge and skills instead of using figure marks. For example, I say, “Michael, you can already use the conjunctions because, as, since, although very well in your speech but you are still weak at using such linking words as however, consequently, moreover.” Or an elementary school teacher may say, “Well done, you can introduce your family members to us.” In this way I make my learners realize that they are a success when they gain this or that language ability not when they get a high mark. After each lesson I ask the learners what language knowledge and skills they have acquired and they answer me in one or two sentences. After this sort of evaluation is implemented in our daily work cheating becomes aimless and good for nothing. Marks for students' knowledge and skills can never be precise however objective and honest their teachers are. Schoolchildren are very often shocked, frustrated and undergo stress when they have to move to other schools where the demands for certain marks are higher than they were at the previous schools. So the sooner we admit the CEFR assessment system at our schools the better.
Another Way of Motivating the Students to Speak
A child is said to have been able to listen even before it is born, and after its birth a child is usually engaged in “listening comprehension” for about 1,5-2 years before it is able to speak. A mother does not teach her child the different grammar rules of her native language “Mother Tongue”. Children learn everything by listening and repeating. While teaching English I always follow this natural sequence: at first I give my students a chance to listen and then they are expected to speak. If I want my students to speak on a topic, I myself begin to speak expressing my own ideas and using the thematic vocabulary. Sometimes I intentionally express wrong ideas to make the students strongly motivated to speak. For example, if our new topic is “Music”, I do not ask them what kind of music they prefer to listen to. They will hardly say anything because they are not motivated to speak yet. At first I tell them what kind of music their parents and grandparents liked to listen to. I tell them how melodic and pleasant to our ear the music of those years was using some new words and expressions connected to the topic “Music”, and only after they have listened to me much enough to be ready to say something I make my first attempt to misbalance them by saying that modern music is good for nothing, and that all the new songs are not melodic. The moment I express such an idea I see several hands raised, and my students begin to assure me that they can bring tens of, hundreds of examples of good songs. At that time my task is only to stop the most active students in order to allow the less active ones to express their ideas and bring their own examples. When they begin quarrelling with me I feel I have achieved my aim. Now they know the new words related to the topic and are motivated to speak.
