How should teachers familiarize themselves with the assessments they need to prepare their students for? Which test strategies should teachers teach? What effect do students’ expectations of test-prep have on teaching? Pete Jones tells us about approaches towards helping students prepare for language tests.
Wants and Needs in Test Preparation - Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn, and this week we are talking about test prep.
I think it's quite a common thing for teachers at some point in their careers to have to help prepare students to take a test. Today, we have an expert on that, Pete Jones. Pete has been helping students prepare for the IELTS exam since 2003. He's also a DELTA‑qualified teacher.
In this episode, Pete talks to us about some of the different ways teachers can help students prepare for tests, effective maximizing positive backwash, and some of the differences between helping students prepare for a test and teaching students English. Enjoy the episode.
Ross: Hi, Pete, thanks for joining us. Do you want to start off by telling us what are some of the differences between teaching a test prep class and teaching a "general English" class?
Pete Jones: My thing says there are surprisingly few differences. I mean, ideally, there should be few differences. In fact, really, I think there only should be two differences. One is test familiarization, so focus on what's the format of the test and how you're assessed. The other is on test strategies, so what are the best ways to answer different types of exam question.
Depending on your course, the balance of those with a focus on language and skills development might change. For a very short introduction to an exam course, where you've got students with mixed abilities, you're going to focus an awful lot more on test familiarization and strategy.
Whereas, if you've got a test preparation course that perhaps runs for three months, with the same students at a similar level, and there's a gap between their language ability and the scores that they want or need, then you're going to have more focus on language skills and language development.
You can split that English into two parts as well. You could have your English, the English language that you've got, so your resource of grammar and vocabulary and the sounds that you can produce, and then your ability to apply them in listening, reading, writing, and speaking ‑‑ the skills.
If you could think of it as four parts, in general English classes, you're generally focused on helping students learn and use more language and using those four skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking.
When you're preparing to teach an exams class that really leaves the area that you need to focus on very clear. You need to understand what the test is, what's the format, how are you assessed in the test, and then you need to think about the strategies students need to use in order to perform their best.
Ross: You mentioned strategies there and helping students understand the test. What's the best way for teachers to familiarize themselves with the test and the best strategies used to take the test?
Pete: I think you need to start by doing a test yourself, thinking about how you did it, what worked, what didn't. You will find, as a teacher, that your students might have done the test before, they might already have been told to use these certain strategies.
As a new teacher, you can be quickly exposed in the classroom and your credibility can be at risk if you propose a certain strategy that is opposite to perhaps how certain people in the class have been taught before.
You've got to know the different strategies that people employ, know which ones you think will work best for your students, or at least know what the advantages and disadvantages are, so that when an alternative strategy is applied in class or proposed in class or when someone challenges what you're suggesting, that the conversation can move to the advantages and disadvantages of strategy A versus strategy B.
Then it's in your students hands as to what they apply. In my experience, there's no point in going head to head with students or teachers around which strategy is best, because it doesn't result in anything. It results in confusion for the student. It's much better to unpack their strategies and think, well, so what's good about this, but what's not.
A typical example is, in the IELTS reading test, should you read the text first to get the main ideas of the text, or should you look at the questions first? Often, teachers are in one camp or the other, and that's what they're telling their students, and in many cases, forcing them to do.
Actually, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. If you read the text first to get an idea of the structure of the text and what the main ideas are, when you look at the questions, it might actually help you find the answers more quickly because you know where to look.
A disadvantage of looking at the text first is that the additional time pressure that had for some of the students. A lot of students feel they just need to get started, they want to look at the questions first. Some students don't yet have those skills of being able to skim a text to identify the main ideas.
The advantage of looking at the questions first might be that you can find particular answers very quickly, and you feel that you're answering questions right from the start, so you're using your time efficiently.
A disadvantage might be it could well take you longer because you don't know where to look in the text or you're looking for the wrong things. You don't have a general understanding of the text that can help you answer those questions. Or you might apply the wrong strategies to the wrong questions.
I think if you look at the questions first, what test‑takers tend to do is they tend to use the same strategy for all questions. Identify a key word, find that key word in the text, read that bit carefully.
But some questions aren't testing your ability to do that. Some questions might be about the main idea of the whole text.
I think the discussion around strategies needs to move to the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies rather than, "This strategy is best for everybody in all occasions."
Ross: Really then, I guess rather than just giving the students one strategies they should apply at all times, we're looking at helping students develop a range of strategies.
Pete: Like a tool belt, right? The tool belt of the strategies that they can apply, and apart from this, the help that the strategies can give in themselves, it also gives them confidence going into the test.
"If I see this, I'm going to do this," "If this happens, I'm going to do that," "If I have this problem, this is what I'm going to do." If students know there are going to be no surprises for them, that breeds confidence.
The role of the teacher in demystifying the test, I think is crucial. By equipping students with knowledge of the test strategies to apply in the test, you're then giving them the best opportunity to use their language resources to the best of their ability.
Ross: I can remember a few years ago observing an IELTS speaking class for the first time, I'm being shocked that the class religiously consisted of a teacher talking to the students in their L1, and the students didn't speak once in the whole class. The class was really just about how to answer a specific test question.
I wanted to ask you, have you seen test prep classes like that before? How useful do you think that type of class is for preparing students to take a test?
Pete: I know the type of lesson that you're talking about, and it doesn't surprise me when I see it, but I obviously think there are other ways for better preparing students for the test. The same applies for general English classes.
If your students are more involved in the process of learning and using language, they're more engaged and are, therefore, more likely to retain any information that's been delivered in the lesson one way or another.
You, as a teacher, are more able to see what your students can and can't do, identify gaps, share strengths, adapt your lessons or create future lessons to address aspects of students speaking that you know need to be improved. If you're talking to your students right now, what do you learn about them? Very, very little.
Ross: That's a really good point, right, that if good teaching is about understanding your learners and teaching them accordingly, then you're obviously not learning very much about the students by lecturing them, are you?
If that type of practice isn't ideal for students, what type of exam practice should teachers be aiming for in a test prep class? Is it really just getting students to practice the exam and giving them feedback?
Pete: I think one thing that's really important for exams class teachers to be aware of is student expectation. A lot of students might come to exam classes very, very focused on preparing for the exam. Now, they might need to develop their language as well. They may or may not know that, but you, as a teacher, know that.
Their expectation might well be for exam practice, and so your role as a teacher might be to package what they need and what they want. What you're doing is providing some exam practice, but what you're also doing is providing what they need, which is language development.
One of the best ways to do that is simulating test practice, and monitoring and providing feedback. Better still, equipping your students with knowledge of the assessment criteria and what the examiners are looking for to assess their own and each other speaking, and then just guiding them with that, confirming their own assessments or challenging their assessments when they're not accurate.
Ross: In terms of helping students understand what's expected of them, something that I have sometimes done before is get students to almost act like examiners in observing and marking a test.
For example, showing them a video of a student taking the IELTS speaking and then getting them to mark that. What do you think about that as a way of making students better aware what's expected of them in a test?
Pete: It's a really good way. I think that the key there is being very focused with what they're listening for or reading. Your students aren't examiners, they're also not language teachers, they also may not be linguists.
The criteria for your exam, whether that's IELTS or another exam, are not written for students, or there might be a student version of the criteria, but often not. Also, I know as an IELTS examiner, that when you're assessing a student speaking, for example, it's incredibly demanding to assess all of the different criteria in one go. I mean, you get better at it over time, but it's still incredibly demanding. We shouldn't expect our students to be able to do that.
Taking a very focused approach can work really well, like just focus on fluency, for example, and have some questions around that that might need to be paraphrased from the descriptions of the different levels, because the descriptions might be using terminology that you would have to clarify or teach your students, which they don't necessarily need to know in their future lives.
Paraphrasing the descriptors, forming them into questions...Just for an example, for IELTS, for spoken fluency questions for your students might be, "Was I," or "Was my partner able to keep going easily," "How many times did I hesitate," "How long were my hesitations," or "Did my partner's hesitations make it more difficult for me to understand them?"
Just focus on that one aspect of speaking or writing if you're doing writing, rather than assessing every aspect of the criteria. I think drip‑feeding the criteria and the descriptors of different levels to students is the best approach, and then over time, they build up that full understanding.
Ross: Finally, Pete, I wanted to ask you about backwash and the dangers of a test prep class focusing very narrowly in what's covered in the test? In IELTS speaking, for example, students aren't required with the tool to ask questions, and yet, if you end up living or studying in a foreign country, you really need to know how to ask questions if you can get by.
As a test prep teacher, how can you help students become better English users, at the same time as making them better test‑takers?
Pete: Ideally, what you want is you want the test to encourage the teachers to teach language and skills that are going to be useful to the students in whatever their next step is after the exam. Any test for practical reasons cannot cover all of the tasks that students are going to need to do in the domain in which they're going into. Your test might have to last a week to do that. There are limitations.
Obviously, a test, any test, has a selective sample of tasks that are relevant to whatever the students are going to go on to do. Your students are going to be very, very focused on those particular tasks.
You, as a teacher, might realize there aren't enough to equip you to what you're going to do next, so it's my job to add in some others. Again, that student expectation comes into play here where you might have to package what students need in what they want.
Take the IELTS speaking test, for example, where the test is a student answering questions given to them by an examiner. This speaking doesn't actually involve the student having to ask any questions.
What you might do is, you might simulate part of the speaking test in class and have one student as an examiner, and one student as a student test‑taker. The examiner will have the speaking questions in front of him.
What you might do is you might encourage that examiner to help their test‑taker in some way by asking follow‑on questions if the test‑taker doesn't give extended answers. What you're doing is you're giving that student an opportunity to ask questions that perhaps, that they won't need in the test, but that perhaps, they'll need in future, after their life after the test.
Then, you could focus some of your feedback on the form of those questions, or the type of questions those students were asking, whether the questions actually were good examples of follow‑on questions. You can build it in, but again, you just might need to build it into what students are expecting, which is that exam‑like tasks.
Ross: One more time, that was Pete Jones. For more about Pete, check out his website, www.freeieltscourse.com. Thanks to Pete for joining us, and thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.