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[william wallace]

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[Lobster]

I conduct regular assessments of my students, but I think you are referring to pre-program level placement assessments. Unfortunately, nobody does this at my school, so I end up with a mishmash of knobgoblins who have such a language-level gap that some of them can't even understand each other.

RED

[william wallace]

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[kev7161]

My class of first graders weren't pre-assessed at all. It was the first 25 whose parents could afford to place them there. I had kids with NO ENGLISH up to kids who were FLUENT in English (well, only 1 of these, actually) with every other level imagninable in between. I simply taught the lessons the best I could and eventually a lot of the kids leveled out to about the same abilities. Still a small percentage that were left behind however. Hopefully, they'll improve next term.

Here's the problem at the high school level, in my opinion. The students don't create their own schedules, rather their schedules are created for them. They all stay in the same classroom with the same students, regardless of abilities (and this is true of all subjects, not just English). So, the schools can't create a (for example) Beginner's English, Intermediate English, and Advanced English class and then have the proper students join the proper class - - based on pre-assessment. No, instead you have Senior 1 English, Senior 2 English, and sometimes Senior 3 English. It doesn't matter if a Senior 1 student is much more advanced than a Senior 3 student. He still must go to that "introductory" class. If students created their own schedule and moved from classroom to classroom (as opposed to teachers moving from classroom to classroom), there may be a more equal set of students in our English classes . . . maybe.

[Roger]

What's more, assessments here are so one-sided as to be totally useless: CET-4, CET-6 - the differences are minimal and reside mainly in the number of words the students had to memorise.

A meaningful assessment should test a student's ability to use all the aspects of the language students have covered in class: how to apply grammar (can they analyse a sentence? Can they transform active voice to passive voice? Can they use tenses correctly when they compose a text?).

Instead we are given students evaluated on a purely quantitative level. And it's not that they have really learnt much; they have passed final tests after rehearsing the same tests umpteen times with their teachers, usually multiple-choice type of tests.

[william wallace]

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