Overdue posts on dated events, part 2

My baptism by fire in teaching continues, with this week's feature being planning, writing, editing, giving, and grading a test. Once again, I was told of this with a few weeks to think about it, but nobody told me anything further. I'm getting used to this, so it was fine--I simply tracked down each of my teachers and asked them for their suggestions. From what I've gathered, the English final is portioned into three parts: 10% comes from the speaking test, 20% from the listening test, and the remaining 70% from a written test. I'm involved in the listening test portion of the first-year students' final exams, and I'm wholly responsible for their speaking test. It's only 10%, sure, but I was given more or less free reign over it. The teachers took a look at it first, of course, to make sure I wasn't doing anything crazy. I look at them as the quality control department--I'm fairly certain that, once I get the hang of things, they'll interfere less and less.

The speaking test consists of a one-on-one interview. We've got 20 students in each class, with a total of 8 different classes of first-year students. The speaking test was slotted for one 50-minute class period. That gives an absolute maximum of 2.5 minutes to each student, and that's assuming they teleport from their seat to my little interview table in the hallway. As it turns out, my school does not in fact own a working teleporter, so the students had to walk to and from the interview table.

My supervisor, who is one of the English teachers, told me the test should be from memory. Having no idea how much time it would take an average student to finish an interview test, how much an average student can memorize, or how difficult to make the material, I came up with a dialogue from one of our lessons (in this case, talking on the telephone). The dialogue consisted of about six lines, and was the second in a pair dealing with taking a message and returning a call. The first of the pair had A calling B asking for C, but C isn't around, so B takes a message. The second has C calling B back, explaining why they missed their call ("I was busy ~ing"), B asking C to do something, and B turning them down with a reason ("I have ~ practice"). Preferring to underdo it instead of overdoing it, I only wanted to use one of the dialogues, and have each student only read one part of the dialogue with me. My supervisor felt this was too easy, and suggested including both dialogues, and having each student read both parts. She's the veteran, and I'm the newbie; I went along with it.

One of the other teachers agreed that it's good to push the students, but the other two teachers were worried it'd be unmanageable. Before anything could be changed, though, I had to give the test to the first batch of students, so I went with the existing configuration. Once it's been given once, the exact same version has to be used for the remaining seven groups. (An interesting footnote: the two teachers who were for the harder version teach primarily higher-level students, with the other two teachers spending more time with the lower-end ones.)

Just for the sake of clarity, this is the dialogue:
A: Hello?
B: Hi! This is __. May I speak to __?
A: I'm sorry, but __ isn't here right now. May I take a message?
B: Would you please tell (him/her) to call me back? My phone number is __.
A: I'll give (him/her) the message.
A: Thank you! Bye.
B: Bye.

B: Hello?
C: Hi, __! This is __.
B: Hey, __!
C: I got your message. Sorry I missed your call. I was busy __ing.
B: That's okay. Would you like to go __ing tomorrow after school?
C: I'm sorry, but I can't. I have __ practice.
B: Okay. Bye!
C: Bye!

The students were free to use any names they wanted, though they had to use the correct pronoun. They could also use any phone number they wanted, and could say any kind of practice. For the "busy __ing" and "go __ing tomorrow" parts, I made cards with three pictures: shopping, fishing, and swimming. Each student would draw one of the cards, and use that word.

To recap the test setup, each student would read each part of each dialogue with me. That comes out to four dialogues per student. You've probably noticed the glaring problem this version presented: four dialogues in less than two and a half minutes comes out to no more than 30 seconds per dialogue. Try timing yourself having a six-line telephone dialogue that includes long, reasonably complex sentences. Now imagine it's in a second language, you're in your first year of high school, and you're not allowed to use a script. (I did: at a decent pace, with short pauses between lines, I read the dialogue in just under 30 seconds. That's with roughly 23 years of speaking experience, and using a script that I wrote.) You can see where this is going.

Not surprisingly, the average time for the students was about 6 minutes. Very few of you understand how painful it is to listen to an ESL student stumble through reasonably difficult memorized English in a cold hallway. After beginning class, last-minute recaps of the test, passing out grade sheets, working out who would go first, and getting my little table set up, 50 minutes turned into barely 40. Each class averaged 8 students left over at the end.

Despite the logistical catastrophe, everything went fairly well. Nobody got mad at me for running over on time; we simply had the extra students come after school and take their test. The worse groups of students averaged 6 or 7 minutes of stammering, broken English, but the better ones did indeed come pretty close to the 2'30" mark. It also gave me the chance to talk one-on-one with the students, a first in most cases.

I should have cut each student off at 2'30", but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it. I eventually saw the futility and made a deal with myself: if they were silent for more than 10 seconds, we moved on to the next line, but as long as they were talking--no matter how slowly--we'd keep going. As you can imagine, it's that last part that killed me. I'll fight tooth and nail to keep the kids from having to learn that much material for such a short test session again.

After the initial planning, the test became entirely mine. The most the teachers talked to me about the test was when they'd ask how it was going, or when I'd ask them for their thoughts on the setup. They weren't anywhere near me when I gave the test, so I was able to grade the students entirely on my own. This allowed me to judge what were and were not acceptable deviations to the script--"Hi" instead of "Hello" was fine, but "would you like go to fishing" wasn't, etc.

Afterwards, I collected the grade sheets, and made a spreadsheet out of them. The kids also get participation points during class, and those points are factored in as a bonus on their final exam score. I added those points to the same spreadsheet. It's very simple procedural stuff, sure, but it's nonetheless my first experience grading a test. The overall average is about 80%, which is no doubt helped by the fact that the students were given about double the time originally planned for the test.

Man, I'm learning a lot about this whole teaching thing. I'm still terribly inexperienced, and in no shape to be a fully independent teacher, but I'm so much better than I was in August, and I'm absolutely loving it here.