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ELT News, November 2009
Prep
Couses For The
Exams In School?
Language proficiency
exams, as we all well know, aim at
assessing or measuring the test
taker's performance when reading,
listening, writing and speaking in
the target language. Success on a
language exam is unequivocally
dependent on the language knowledge
and skills that the test taker has
developed. Or, so people assume.
However, those of us who are
involved with language education and
training know that this is only
partially true and that -whether we
want to admit it or not- language
exams test much more than just
language knowledge, competence or
performance. There is ample research
data to confirm what we already know
from our own experience; i.e., that
success on language exams depends on
a wide variety of factors that
affect performance. These include
the test takers' cognitive
development and their literacy level,
attitudes toward particular exams
and their contents, on their ability
to work under pressure, and on their
familiarity with the test format and
the test-taking strategies required
for the successful completion of
specific type of test activities or
tasks.
The last of the aforementioned
factors has been of particular
concern to the English team of the
University of Athens working for the
preparation of The KPG Exams
, and it has motivated
research being carried out at the
RCeL ,
as already mentioned in a previous "KPG
Corner" article. The May 2009 ELT
News article,
where our understanding of the term test-taking strategy
appears, reports
initial results from the first two
phases of one aspect of the Test-taking Strategies Research Project
(TSRP). The overall aim of the TSRP
is "to investigate the strategies
used by candidates in each of the
four test papers of The KPG Exams
." In addition, during the
first phases of our research, we
wanted to confirm the following
assumption: Regardless of the type
of language instruction they have
received, target language level
students can be trained in a
relatively short period of time to
use successfully the test-taking
strategies required by the KPG test
tasks. Our assumption was indeed
confirmed through our work with 60
University of Athens students, who
were offered a 60 hour crash course
in English on two different
occasions (in classes of 15 students
each). During their intensive
course, these under- and
post-graduate students, from
different university departments,
were prepared to sit for the B2 and
the C1 level KPG exams during the
two 2008 administrations. The
success rate in the exams was very
satisfactory -92% of the students
passed.
To investigate this assumption
further, we organized KPG exam
preparation courses (henceforth prep
courses), on a pilot basis, in ten
different urban and rural areas of
Greece. Five of the participant
institutions were state (primary and
secondary) schools in Attica,
Ioannina, Lakonia, Thessaloniki, and
Rhodes, and the rest were
institutions of higher learning: the
Technical Institutions (TEI) in
Chalkis and Herakleion, as well as
in Athens (the Agricultural
University in Athens) and Florina
(the University of Western
Macedonia). The project was
coordinated by the RCeL.
Margarita Leonti worked
under my guidance to counsel
instructors and provide practical
support. The
classes offered have intended to
prepare students in these
institutions to sit for the May '09
or the November '09 exams in English
at A1+A2, B1, B2 or C1 level. The
school classes were carried out
during extra school hours, in the
framework of the Support-Teaching
State School Programme, while the
TEI and the university courses were
offered as extracurricular activity.
The educational aim of these courses
has been (a) to train target level
participants so as to develop the
strategies for success in the KPG
exams, and (b) to provide fertile
ground to participating instructors
so that they design suitable syllabi
and prepare guidelines for the use
of past exam papers as teaching
materials for prep courses in
schools. On the other hand, the
research aim was threefold:
-
To
locate the strategies used by
school and college students for
successful performance on
particular activities and tasks
of The KPG Exams.
-
To confirm findings from the
experimental programme with
University of Athens students
showing that training plays a
decisive role in strategy use
and can actually enhance
prospective candidates'
performance.
-
To compare the strategies used
by the University of Athens
students with the strategies
used by younger students from
different geographical and
social settings, different age
groups and literacy levels, etc.
Feedback and valuable
data is currently being collected,
tabulated, analysed, interpreted and
assessed. Research results and
findings will be published in the
near future. In the meantime, our
second experiment also showed that
it is possible to train students in
a short period of time and that it
is possible for any interested
teacher to offer KPG exam prep
courses in schools and other
educational institutions. The claim
some teachers make that "there are
no books to teach from" is not
really valid. Those willing to try
will find ways of doing it and are
likely to get very positive results,
especially if help and support is
provided. Therefore, we intend to
provide such help and support to
teachers who want to offer KPG prep
courses. Syllabi, lesson plans and
materials are to appear on a special
page of the RCeL website (http://rcel.enl.uoa.gr/).
Interested instructors should look
for it, starting the new calendar
year.
In the meantime, we are eagerly
reading the enthusiastic reports
that teachers are sending us. One of
them is by Stella
Karatza,
who offered a pilot prep course from
February to May in 2009 to a small
group of students in a rural area
school at which she was teaching.
The students to whom the course was
advertised were in the first two
years of the lyceum and the
Technical and Vocational School of
the Municipality of Elos in Laconia.
Out of the 30 students interested in
B1 and B2 level prep courses, only
10 students took the diagnostic test
and later attended the course. All
10 of them said that they had learnt
their English by attending classes
in school and an average of 3 years
of extra classes in private-tuition
language centres.
The course offered was welcomed by
students and their families because
it did not burden them financially,
and they were grateful for the
chance given to them. The students
were thankful despite the fact that,
as a whole, this was a demotivated
group of learners at school. They
seemed to regard this opportunity as
a prospect for a new beginning of
their own making. Nobody made them
take the class. It was their own
decision to attend regularly and
attempt to achieve a goal that they
had chosen to set for themselves.
Possible failure in the exam did not
pose a threat, as their preparation
did not weigh on their parents'
pockets.
Ms Karatza reports that during the
course her students developed "suitable
test-taking strategies which could
be used not only for KPG activities,
but also for other school subjects
and lifeworld tasks." She also
claims that her students' English
was improved. Testimony to this are
improved grades at the end of the
4-month school period and on final
exams. Furthermore, Ms Karatza goes
on to say that the prep course "definitely
had a positive waskback effect on
the participants" who assessed the
course as particularly useful and
stated they would like to attend a
similar course again. "My feeling
was that this preparation course at
school functioned as a special
incentive for students. They had a
purpose for the work they were doing
at school whereas usually they feel
that their efforts are for nothing
tangible -just grades." And she
continues: "For me, teaching this
group of students was a valuable
social experience. Prior to this, I
had only taught English in private
language centres in urban areas.
Through teaching this particular
group, I was provided with the
opportunity to detect interesting
differences between urban and rural
area students. I discovered that my
students' everyday life experiences,
concerns, and expectations
invariably differed from the ones
that most of my urban students had,
and that this was reflected on test
task performance. Each group had
different types of knowledge, social
literacy and experiences. For
example, someone with no free
weekends might be a shepherd for the
rural group but a multinational
company executive for the urban
group students. Concepts such as
traffic, noise pollution, rush hour
and the use of different means of
transport are not lived experiences
for my rural area students whereas
my urban students could understand
fewer things about the life of trees,
plants and animals. All in all, I
became very conscious of the fact
that tests have important social
literacy requirements. For the first
time in my life as a teacher I began
to think that if lifeworld
experiences and social literacies
have a direct effect on exam
performance, it is possible that
failure in international exams may
sometimes be due to the fact that
some of the texts and test tasks are
irrelevant to test-takers' cultural
experiences."
Ms Karatza ends her detailed report
by urging us to help teachers in
state schools to take advantage of
the Support-Teaching State School
Programme and prepare students for
the language exams. "In planning
crash courses for this purpose,
ideally teachers and students should
meet twice a week during the school
year, for at least one teaching hour.
Students can develop self-study
techniques in order to do work at
home and save precious classtime for
feedback on work done at home, and
for raising awareness regarding the
strategies used for success in the
exam."
Prof. B. Dendrinos
Academic
director of The KPG Exams
The
Research Centre for English
Language Teaching and
Testing of the Faculty of
English Studies.
A test-taking
strategy is thereby defined
as "any discrete tactic,
rule, or procedure that
increases the probability of
successful solution of
common test questions -for
example, multiple-choice
items."
The way the classes were
organized with the
University of Athens
students and the conclusions
drawn from the first phases
of the TSRP were presented
by Ms Leonti at a KPG
Conference held at the
Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki in September
2008, which was attended by
a relatively large number of
state school EFL teachers,
who were attracted to the
idea and volunteered to
offer similar classes to
their students. Their wish
to do so was mainly
triggered by a general
demand that foreign language
certification should be
linked to foreign language
education in school.
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