Friday 3 February 2017

Activating the mind

In our fast-paced world we have found quick ways of accomplishing tasks. Technology has been put at our service but I often feel that we end up serving rather than employing it for our purposes.

 Performing tasks with or without technology requires different thinking processes and in teaching or testing language it may make all the difference. I often see students become more absorbed by the medium used than the contents presented.

I must admit I am a latecomer to technology, but that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t see the enormous benefits that can be drawn from it. I can open different dictionaries at the same time, I can find all kinds of teaching material, I can use different programs to make my presentations more challenging or to create all kinds of exercises and texts.

Universities testing English have standardised their exams and assigned the correction of most tasks – with the notable exception of writing -- to computers. This has cut the cost of correcting exam papers significantly though I am not sure it does provide equal opportunities for everyone.

Multiple-choice questions, one-word answers and closed transformations do not necessarily do justice to a candidate’s ability and knowledge. I have taught many students who can articulate their views and communicate effectively but are stumped by standardised tests. And this brings me to the next even more serious mistake of limiting yourself to the types of exercises that are used in the exams. Most course books starting at level A1 include tasks which students will have to do in exams years later. How can we interpret this? Should teachers confine themselves to or even content themselves with these specific types of tasks? Are students’ minds “wired” to learn with so little variety and such poor stimulation?

As a teacher I try to use materials that will stimulate my students’ interest and will engage different parts of the brain. I often create exercises that are designed to slow down their reading so that they will focus longer on each part of the text. One simple way of doing this is by getting them to fill gaps in the text with words which have been removed and jumbled.

I am providing here an example of tasks that I assigned on a recent scientific article that I found on BBC. It contains an open cloze exercise, a few questions on the text which are intended to provide a deep understanding of the processes described in the article and a sample of two multiple-choice questions. Of course, in a real class you would not want to use all three of them, but I am juxtaposing them so that one can judge for oneself whether multiple-choice questions in fact facilitate understanding.

Needless to say, my stand is that as teachers we have to create our own ways of making sure that the text is treated as a vehicle of meaning and not as a point of reference for working out the right answers to multiple-choice questions, mostly by the method of elimination. The latter is an intellectual exercise but does not promote real learning or understanding; it does not even fulfil the actual aim of reading, which is to inform or entertain oneself depending on whether one reads factual or literary texts.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KbDhWanVnSnVlRWM/view?usp=sharing


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