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.
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