What’s your main goal in teaching English? You’ll probably
say something along the lines of „enabling students to communicate well in
English” and perhaps also „developing students to be better people”. But have you
ever had a group of students preparing for an examination? Then you know that
your success or failure will be measured by not by how well they can express
themselves in real life, and not even by how well they fit into society. Where
there is an important exam at the end of the process, you can only succeed if
your students pass the exam. It’s that simple.
What many of your students (and their parents) will expect
you to do is to get them through the exam – which for them may also well mean
the end of learning. Which, of course, should not be the end of the process.
Learning is for life.
But what does this mean in terms of classroom practice?
EXAM PREPARATION TO-DO LIST
1. You will have to cover the exam syllabus (the topics, the
grammar and vocabulary, the skills and sub-skills), and make sure you don’t
miss out anything.
2. You will have to familiarise your students with all the
exam task types, and provide them with strategies to complete each type of task
with maximum efficiency.
3. You will have to familiarise your students with the
assessment criteria – so they know how to maximise their point scores, and how
to avoid losing valuable points.
4. You will have to provide students with practice and
rehearsal opportunities, so when they get to the real exam, it’s not their
first time completing it.
The above is just a rough shortlist of priorities.
To continue with the same train of thought, what does this
mean in terms of what you’re NOT going to do in the classroom?
EXAM PREPARATION NOT-GOING-TO-DO LIST
1. You are not going to cover language points that aren’t
required in the exam. Students probably won’t mind. But don’t forget that often
we only teach language points because we know they’re going to be tested.
Throughout my career as a learner, there has always been a massive emphasis on
irregular verbs. They are certainly useful, but the reason we spent so much
time memorising long lists of them was merely that they were going to feature
in our exams. Think about this – is there any language you’d skip or spend less
time on if it wasn’t in the exam?
2. You are going to prioritise the task types that do occur
in the exam over those that don’t – which means you’re probably going to reduce
task type variety. You feel responsible for your students’ success, so you make
sure their exposure to exam expectations is maximised. When it comes down to a
choice between, say, an open personalised speaking task and another
multiple-choice gap fill, perhaps you’re going to go for the gap fill... again.
3. In order to prepare your students well and to make sure
you’re not leaving even your weakest student behind, you’re going to spend a
lot of time focusing on what’s needed for the exam. When pressed for time, you
are not going to do too many activities which have no connection to the exam.
This includes games, drama, discussion of controversial / intriguing (depending
on your viewpoint) subjects, jokes and humour in general... can you continue
this list? Exams are neutral, non-controversial, and let’s face it, pretty
bland. Which is fine because tests are measurement tools, and it’s important to
reduce unwanted extra factors, like emotional responses. But bear in mind that
„pretty bland” is exactly the opposite of what language classes should be! How
are you going to motivate students if you’re spending so much time doing stuff
that isn’t motivating?
FINDING A BALANCE
The difficult solution is to prepare students in a way that
teaches them all the real-life communication skills rather than focuses on
mechanical test task preparation. For example, instead of aiming to practise a
format like four-option multiple choice cloze, your aim could be on the
communicative goal of the text you use, but using the mcq format to highlight
some of the cohesive devices of that type of text. Or instead of comparing and
contrasting two arbitrarily chosen coursebook photos, your aim could be sharing
personal experiences of special occasions – through comparing and contrasting family
photos of, say, weddings or graduation ceremonies. The trick would be to always
aim to do both: exams as well as real life.
What I’m saying is that our general aims in language
teaching and the aims of exam preparation are linked, but sometimes their
priorities clash, and it will be up to you to strike the right balance and to
blend learning for real life and exam preparation.
This article was originally
published on the OUP ELT Global Blog on 7 April 2013 as a preview of my workshop at the 2013 IATEFL conference in Liverpool,
and appears here in an updated form.
