It's only a test...but it could be more, you know

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Lately my wife has been kind of worried about me.  We usually have a drink after we finish up our after-work-work and the other day she said, "You know, the way you talk lately, it seems like you've hit some kind of wall in your teaching."  Which is exactly how I feel.  I've hit a big wall.  I think if I could step back a little and look at that wall, it would be covered in graffiti.  Maybe a nice red, green and black color scheme. And once the colors came into view, if I took a few more steps back, I would probably be able to read the words, "reflective teaching can hurt!" in giant loopy letters.

But right now there is no wall.  There is only my computer.  And if I finish up in the next hour or so, a drink with my wife.  On Valentine's Day.  A rainy valentines day.  It rained all day today.  It rained all day yesterday as well.  So I was pretty sure that my students wouldn't stick around for the STEP interview test practice.  But two students did.  They were waiting for me in room 403.  They were flipping through the notes from their last practice session.  Flip, flip, flip.  And right off the bat I felt guilty.  "Sorry guys, the answers aren't in there.  I made a mistake," I wanted to say.  But I wasn't sure.  So I sent Mi-Chan outside so we could do a run-through of the test and see what happened.

Now the STEP test is made for the Japanese market, so I'm not sure how much teachers in other countries might know about it.  The written part of the test is pretty standard, with some vocabulary questions, dialog transcript based questions, and reading and comprehension exercises.  There's also a listening section which is actually pretty useless innocuous as it only tests students ability to listen for specific information.  But my students rarely break a sweat when thinking about the written test.  It's the interview portion of the test that makes them crazy.  And why?  Certainly not because of the content.  A typical STEP test question for the pre-2nd level (high school second year) might be something like, "Do you think Japanese young people watch too much TV?" or "Are Japanese people losing interest in traditional arts?"  And basically you only need to put together two grammatically correct sentences to receive a passing grade for each question.  But Japanese people have been told over and over again that they just can't speak English.  If you Google "Why are Japanese people bad at English," you will actually find page after page of articles which deal with this issue as if it is an issue.  Whereas if you type in "Why are French people bad at English," only the first two hits actually have anything to do with French people's perceived English deficiencies.  And if you type in "Why are Chinese people bad at English," none of the first page of hits has anything to specifically do with Chinese speaker's inability to handle English.  So while there might be valid reasons for lower level ability in Japanese learners of English (which I'll take up in another post some day), there is undoubtedly the very real issue of self-confidence, or complete lack thereof.

Knock, knock, knock!  That was Mi-Chan banging on the door.  So I cleared my throat and doing my best impression of an official STEP test tester invited her into the room.  Mi-Chan had diligently studied her notes and answered every question I asked as if orally dotting a series of 'i's. 

Then I asked her, "Do you think people in Japan work too much these days?" 

Mi-Chan thought for a second and said, "Yes.  I know many people who work too hard.  They are working for 10 hours a day." 

This was exactly the kind of answer I had been helping my students put together over the past week.  I looked at Mi-Chan.  Her shoulders were up.  She was looking over my shoulder.  When she finished her answer, she didn't relax her pose.  She didn't lean back.  It was like she was waiting for the next tiger to pop out of the door in the arena or something. 

"Mi-Chan," I said.  "I'm sorry.  I made a mistake when I was teaching you how to answer these questions before."  I explained that I didn't want perfect answers.  I just wanted her to tell me how she felt and what she really thought. 

Mi-Chan hesitated, but finally she said, "My father works too much." 

I nodded.

"He works every day.  I never see him."

Pause.

"People need relax time.  Seriously, I think everybody need more relax time." Mi-Chan looked at me, waiting for the next question of the test.

"I think so too.  I'm sorry your father has to work so hard," I said. 

And then it happened.  Mi-Chan leaned back in her chair.  Her shoulders drooped.  And we talked about what it means to work too much.  I recorded it all.  We went over how to use the phrase "time to ~."  We practiced three more sets of questions.   And Mi-Chan used language that she rarely has demonstrated in a classroom environment.  Probably my favorite answer of the day was in response to the question, "Do you like to stay in luxury hotels on vacation?"  Mi-Chan thought for a moment and said, "I can't stay in luxury hotels.  I don't have enough money.  If I were rich I would stay in a luxury hotel.  I think everybody wants to stay in a luxury hotel."

The other day I wrote that even standardized testing can be an affordance.  I still believe that.  But more than that, practicing for standardized testing can be a humanizing endeavor.  Maybe, as teachers, that's our job, taking the dehumanizing machinery of a standard test, and making it human, teacher to student, question to question.  I know that with the three students I practiced with today, just by giving them a little more space to express what they wanted to express, their English ability as measured by richness of vocabulary and complexity of grammar showed marked improvement.  And maybe more importantly, they laughed or sighed or shook their heads in a way that wasn't just about answering a question.

It's 11:00 PM.  It's Valentines day.  Time to have a drink with my wife.  She's right.  I'm bumping up against a wall lately.  But it's probably a wall I should have bumped into a long while back.  And it's only the first of a long series of walls I'm going to have to find my way over.  But tonight is Valentine's Day.  Hope yours was filled with love.

Walking the Walk: testing should be an affordance, but...

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I’ve had something that’s been bothering me for a while now.  It’s the pebble I can’t shake out of my shoe.  It’s the English STEP test.  3 times a year I’ve got to prep my kids for the listening and then the interview test.  And my school is just crazy about these tests.  I’m not going to spend much time pointing fingers at the administration.  STEP test results are good for business.  When students pass the 2^nd level, its something real they can put on their resumes.  It helps them get into university.  The shiny certificates make for great photo shoots.  And the test isn’t the problem.  How I teach for the test is the problem.

You see, after 13 years of preparing students for the test I know what a student needs to do to squeak by.  Especially in the interview test.  If the tester asks, “Do you think cars will still use gasoline in the future?”  All the student has to do is catch “car” and “future” and string together two grammatically correct and understandable sentences about cars in the future.  Or if they catch “future” and “gasoline” they can do the same with those two key words.  For example, “In the future I don’t think there will be gasoline.  Gasoline is very bad for the environment,” or "I don't think there will be cars in the future.  Most people will use buses or maybe bicycles."  Basically, you can teach students to listen for key words and then use whatever bare-minimum language they can put together to answer the question.  But this is not communication.  This is not teaching English.  And worst of all, this is not respecting the students and believing in their abilities.  

Now I would like to say that I use the STEP Test as a chance to help students develop critical thinking skills, express their opinions and generally work on their communicative abilities.  But, truth of the matter is, I spend much more time just making sure they pass.  How do I know?  Because I record the students when we do mock interviews.  And this week I also recorded myself giving them feedback.  And then I listened to what I focused in on with the students.  

I did the mock interviews in one of the larger empty classroom on the 4th floor.  The recorder had a good mic., so it caught the echo as my voice rang off the walls.  While I was listening, I started to feel uncomfortable.  I sounded so sure about everything I was saying.  That was the first sign that something was off.  I'm rarely that sure in the classroom.  As I listened I kept hoping to hear something that put the student at the center of the experience.  One of the mock questions was, "Do you like to stay at luxury hotels?"  This could have led to real exchanges about family vacations or Japanese hot spring resorts.  But no.  My feedback was on how to pass the test, how to keep it simple and be understood, not on how to answer the questions in any kind of way that fostered self-expression.  

So what am I going to do about it?  Just keep walking around with the pebble in my shoe?  The truth is, I don’t know if I have enough courage to do what I think is right.  Why?  Part of it is self-preservation.  Another part is fear that if the students fail, they might end up damaged (and I know that is so patronizing).  I could just ask the students, “Do you want to focus on getting better at English or on passing the test,” but that seems like an abdication of responsibility.  And I don't need to ask.   When I listened to the recording of one student's wonderfully convoluted and nearly two minute long answer about why she likes to watch movies at home, I knew that what that student wants, what almost all my students want, is for someone to understand them, not to just be merely understandable. 

When I think of the English teachers and teacher trainers I really respect, I feel like I know what they would be doing in a similar situation.  From Monday to Friday I have five days in a row of Step tutoring.  I'm going to try to do what I can to change directions.  Hopefully, by the end of the week I'll have something positive to post.  I've had enough of this hobbling along.  

(Thanks to #ELTchat for bringing up the issue of testing in general.  It was the outside force I needed to help me take a harder look at what I am doing in my classroom)