Ranjit Podder :
(From previous issue)
Nunan (1988) maintains that, as language teaching and learning is skill-based, language proficiency must be determined in terms of behaviour. According to Nunan, proficiency in this context refers to students’ ability to perform certain communicative tasks with a certain degree of skill; skill in grammar, tenses, vocabulary, socio-cultural contexts, and phonology. Nunan argues that students have to be skilled in reacting appropriately in different and changing situations. Nunan (1988) holds that it is the teachers’ and the curriculum designers’ responsibility to decide how they will assess the learners’ language skills.
Brown (2004), and Cheng and Curtis (2004) state that assessment systems often determine the teaching and learning culture of a classroom and assessment tools are very powerful having the influence to change the educational system eyen without changing other educational components such as teacher training and curriculum.
Although assessment has a great power to change classroom practices, little research has been conducted and written to date in regard to assessment in English language education in the Bangladesh context.
The identified barriers to the assessment of oral-aural skills are: teachers did not have to assess listening and speaking skills; English was taught mixed with Bangla; teachers assessed students’ written work to check linguistic accuracy; and the curriculum needed restructuring to start listening and speaking assessment. in addition to the barriers, the apparent enablers arc: teachers demanded training in oral-aural skills assessment; teachers were awareness of the importance of listening and speaking skills practices and assessment; and the teachers were resilient and optimistic. Although the teachers did not assess listening and speaking skills, they had their own ideas about starting aural-oral assessment in the framework of the present English curriculum.
Teachers’ understandings, ideas, beliefs, as well as barriers they experienced, and enablers regarding listening and speaking skills assessment are as follows.
In the current English language assessment practices, teachers have to assess reading and writing skills as a requirement of the English curriculum but they do not have to assess listening and speaking skills of students. Neither these two skills are assessed or tested in schools nor in the sse examinations. Abonti mentioned that although a few proactive teachers assessed listening and speaking skills informally, they needed higher authority decisions to include them in the formal assessment system in schools. She also sought favourable attitudes from the school head teachers regarding some marks allotment for listening and speaking skills. She commented:
We need decision from the school or higher authority to allot marks for listening and speaking in terminal examinations. Very often the school authority loves to see the syllabus completion focusing on the important aspects of the textbooks and listening and speaking is not important for students to pass the examinations.
However, Ali expressed his disappointment even with the quality of present reading and writing skills assessment system arguing that despite studying English at secondary schools for five years, some students could not write grammatically correct English sentences.
Abu, who also assessed only reading and writing skills of his students, expressed his regret that the curriculum did not allow him to assess listening and speaking skills of his students.
Another teacher, Kamal, also argued that he did not have scope for assessing listening and speaking skills in his schools because the curriculum had not been designed to assess the four language skills. He claimed that the existing assessment system allowed him only to test the reading and writing skills of his students.
Wadud, who taught in a village town school, and who was trying to introduce listening and speaking skills assessment to his school, expressed his unhappiness and despair that listening and speaking assessment had not been introduced even after 15 years of the CLT introduction. He said, “1 have to say, in our country the testing (assessment) system
is faulty. Only two skills, reading and writing, are tested ; and listening and speaking are ignored”.
Ali expressed disappointment because he could not involve students in practising and assessing listening and speaking skills. He commented, “Most students are not interested to do that extra work of listening and speaking practice as it is not assessed in their year final and SSC examinations”. Abu also spoke about the lack of English language practice opportunities in Bangladesh and he admitted that teachers did not create sufficient listening and speaking opportunities for students in the classrooms, either.
Although four teachers taught in a traditional way despite having training in the modern methods and techniques of teaching English language, the formative assessment of their students’ learning was limited to testing the knowledge contained in the text they taught. Teachers did not provide students with opportunities to speak and listen to each other. For example here are two excerpts from my field notes in observing teaching by Kamal
and Atanu, respectively:
Kamal taught a lesson which had a focus on listening (actually it had focus on all the four skills although my main focus of observation was listening) in class ten (class X, unit 17, lesson 1, topic: The Maghs). He asked the students to listen to what he was going to read out. After finishing the listening text in a minute or so, he asked the students some questions. The questions were: where did the Maghs come from? Where do the Maghs live? Can you describe how to cook sticky rice?
Atanu taught a speaking lesson (the lesson also focused on reading and writing) in class ten (class X, unit 10, lesson 1, topic: Meeting Feroza). He read out and explained the text line by line although the reading was for students. When he finished, he asked nine students questions such as ‘When did Becky come to Bangladesh? /here did Masum take Becky?’ He did not utilise the opportunities in section A of the lesson to involve students in talking about a picture or describing the picture or asking and answering the questions given underneath the picture.
All the six participating teachers were found during observations to conduct formative assessment in the classrooms but most of them did it in order to check students’ content and linguistic knowledge. Four out of the six teachers did not assess listening and speaking on excuse that those were not required by the English language curriculum and the teachers were not trained to do that, but the other two did assess aural-oral skills out
of their responsibility to benefit the students.
There was a call from all the six teachers to start listening and speaking practices and assessment but they did not do it as it was not expected by their higher authority and as students’ SSC results were determined only on the basis of reading and writing skills achievement. They reported that they did not usually involve students in listening and
speaking practices and students were not interested either, as only reading and writing sills were tested in schools and in the SSC examinations.
A further considerable barrier identified was teachers’ own lack of fluency and/or lack of confidence in the use of oral English. One insight emerged from the interviews and observations was that teachers used Bangla, their mother language, randomly in English classes. Although all the six teachers conducted their classes mostly in English during my observations, three of them failed to communicate fluently and clearly the students were, too, in most cases unable to understand those three teachers. Teachers’ and students’ struggle with speaking as well as students’ lack of response indicated that English classes were not usually taught in English. That is, neither teachers nor students were accustomed to these sorts of teaching and learning practices. All the participants, too, frankly spoke that not only they but also most English teachers they knew, taught English mixed with Bangla.
Wadud commented, “English teachers frequently use their mother tongue Bangla in their classrooms. That’s why students arc not motivated”. He maintained that no skill could be achieved without practice. He said: “It’s a skill; it can be done only by practising that particular skill. So, it’s our responsibility to speak first, they will listen. When students will listen, they will feel the urge to speak.” Wadud, too, spoke Bangla in his teaching and he legitimised by saying, “Sometimes when students don’t understand, I use Bangla and sometimes when they can’t speak out their ideas in English, they use Bangla and I tell their ideas in English”.
Ali believed that students could not understand him and so he had to use Bangla. The following quotation of his indicated that Bangla was common in the English class and other English teachers of his school, too, taught English with the help of Bangla. He argued, “Most of my students cannot understand me when 1 speak thoroughly in English. They ask me to speak in Bangla”. He further added that although his students got good marks in English, they could not speak the language.
Kamal described the English teaching situation in the country by stating that teachers did not speak English even in the English classes other than reading out a text or asking questions from the textbook exercise. He added, “Only’ -topic is English but total discussion, conversation, and asking and answering is in Bangla.” Kamal further asserted that the English teachers of Bangladesh had satisfactory’ level of linguistic competence but they lacked communicative capability in English.
Abonti regretted that the English teachers taught English using Bangla. She said: “If we conduct the whole class in English they cannot communicate with us because different levels of students arc in the same classroom”.
All the six teachers commented that they had to speak Bangla because students could not follow their talking or instructions unless they were translated into the mother language but the interviews and the observations showed that three of the six participating teachers also lacked speaking skills in English although each of them had been teaching English for more than seven years. They often paused during teaching English fumbling for suitable words, phrases, and tenses of verbs.
The second identified barrier was the teachers’ tendency to prioritise accuracy. It emerged from the teachers’ interviews and observations that all the six teachers were inclined to value accuracy over fluency and they assessed students’ language skills for different reasons. One reason that was obvious from their interviews was that they assessed students’ language skills with a view to developing students’ linguistic competence. Ali’s aim of English language assessment was “to check the grammatical accuracy of students’ language.” Additionally he said, “A Bangladeshi student willing to learn English needs to memorise some important vocabulary and grammatical rules for accurate use of the language.” Ali went further by saying that most Bangladeshi students memorised answers to some specific questions to pass the examinations.
Wadud clarified the purpose of his students’ language skills assessment as ‘1 try to know whether my pupils use the language properly; and whether they can communicate using the target language’. However, it seems Wadud talked about the written form of communication because listening and speaking skills were not formally assessed in his school, either.
Abonti stated that assessment told her about her students’ progress. “We assess students to check where they are up to, I mean, how much students have progressed,” she said. Kamal expressed similar views: “Specially, I take some assessment of the students to judge their development and the ratio of their learning. This is the main thing we test the students.” Abu said, “We assess students to assess (measure) their ability or power, writing power” because “they have to communicate with someone else” using the language. All the six teachers attached importance to the accurate written form of the target language.
Despite the very real constraints faced by teachers, there was also considerable awareness of the need for curriculum change and willingness to embrace this. Wadud pointed out that the present curriculum did not have any provision to assess the listening and speaking skills of students.
(To be continued)
(From previous issue)
Nunan (1988) maintains that, as language teaching and learning is skill-based, language proficiency must be determined in terms of behaviour. According to Nunan, proficiency in this context refers to students’ ability to perform certain communicative tasks with a certain degree of skill; skill in grammar, tenses, vocabulary, socio-cultural contexts, and phonology. Nunan argues that students have to be skilled in reacting appropriately in different and changing situations. Nunan (1988) holds that it is the teachers’ and the curriculum designers’ responsibility to decide how they will assess the learners’ language skills.
Brown (2004), and Cheng and Curtis (2004) state that assessment systems often determine the teaching and learning culture of a classroom and assessment tools are very powerful having the influence to change the educational system eyen without changing other educational components such as teacher training and curriculum.
Although assessment has a great power to change classroom practices, little research has been conducted and written to date in regard to assessment in English language education in the Bangladesh context.
The identified barriers to the assessment of oral-aural skills are: teachers did not have to assess listening and speaking skills; English was taught mixed with Bangla; teachers assessed students’ written work to check linguistic accuracy; and the curriculum needed restructuring to start listening and speaking assessment. in addition to the barriers, the apparent enablers arc: teachers demanded training in oral-aural skills assessment; teachers were awareness of the importance of listening and speaking skills practices and assessment; and the teachers were resilient and optimistic. Although the teachers did not assess listening and speaking skills, they had their own ideas about starting aural-oral assessment in the framework of the present English curriculum.
Teachers’ understandings, ideas, beliefs, as well as barriers they experienced, and enablers regarding listening and speaking skills assessment are as follows.
In the current English language assessment practices, teachers have to assess reading and writing skills as a requirement of the English curriculum but they do not have to assess listening and speaking skills of students. Neither these two skills are assessed or tested in schools nor in the sse examinations. Abonti mentioned that although a few proactive teachers assessed listening and speaking skills informally, they needed higher authority decisions to include them in the formal assessment system in schools. She also sought favourable attitudes from the school head teachers regarding some marks allotment for listening and speaking skills. She commented:
We need decision from the school or higher authority to allot marks for listening and speaking in terminal examinations. Very often the school authority loves to see the syllabus completion focusing on the important aspects of the textbooks and listening and speaking is not important for students to pass the examinations.
However, Ali expressed his disappointment even with the quality of present reading and writing skills assessment system arguing that despite studying English at secondary schools for five years, some students could not write grammatically correct English sentences.
Abu, who also assessed only reading and writing skills of his students, expressed his regret that the curriculum did not allow him to assess listening and speaking skills of his students.
Another teacher, Kamal, also argued that he did not have scope for assessing listening and speaking skills in his schools because the curriculum had not been designed to assess the four language skills. He claimed that the existing assessment system allowed him only to test the reading and writing skills of his students.
Wadud, who taught in a village town school, and who was trying to introduce listening and speaking skills assessment to his school, expressed his unhappiness and despair that listening and speaking assessment had not been introduced even after 15 years of the CLT introduction. He said, “1 have to say, in our country the testing (assessment) system
is faulty. Only two skills, reading and writing, are tested ; and listening and speaking are ignored”.
Ali expressed disappointment because he could not involve students in practising and assessing listening and speaking skills. He commented, “Most students are not interested to do that extra work of listening and speaking practice as it is not assessed in their year final and SSC examinations”. Abu also spoke about the lack of English language practice opportunities in Bangladesh and he admitted that teachers did not create sufficient listening and speaking opportunities for students in the classrooms, either.
Although four teachers taught in a traditional way despite having training in the modern methods and techniques of teaching English language, the formative assessment of their students’ learning was limited to testing the knowledge contained in the text they taught. Teachers did not provide students with opportunities to speak and listen to each other. For example here are two excerpts from my field notes in observing teaching by Kamal
and Atanu, respectively:
Kamal taught a lesson which had a focus on listening (actually it had focus on all the four skills although my main focus of observation was listening) in class ten (class X, unit 17, lesson 1, topic: The Maghs). He asked the students to listen to what he was going to read out. After finishing the listening text in a minute or so, he asked the students some questions. The questions were: where did the Maghs come from? Where do the Maghs live? Can you describe how to cook sticky rice?
Atanu taught a speaking lesson (the lesson also focused on reading and writing) in class ten (class X, unit 10, lesson 1, topic: Meeting Feroza). He read out and explained the text line by line although the reading was for students. When he finished, he asked nine students questions such as ‘When did Becky come to Bangladesh? /here did Masum take Becky?’ He did not utilise the opportunities in section A of the lesson to involve students in talking about a picture or describing the picture or asking and answering the questions given underneath the picture.
All the six participating teachers were found during observations to conduct formative assessment in the classrooms but most of them did it in order to check students’ content and linguistic knowledge. Four out of the six teachers did not assess listening and speaking on excuse that those were not required by the English language curriculum and the teachers were not trained to do that, but the other two did assess aural-oral skills out
of their responsibility to benefit the students.
There was a call from all the six teachers to start listening and speaking practices and assessment but they did not do it as it was not expected by their higher authority and as students’ SSC results were determined only on the basis of reading and writing skills achievement. They reported that they did not usually involve students in listening and
speaking practices and students were not interested either, as only reading and writing sills were tested in schools and in the SSC examinations.
A further considerable barrier identified was teachers’ own lack of fluency and/or lack of confidence in the use of oral English. One insight emerged from the interviews and observations was that teachers used Bangla, their mother language, randomly in English classes. Although all the six teachers conducted their classes mostly in English during my observations, three of them failed to communicate fluently and clearly the students were, too, in most cases unable to understand those three teachers. Teachers’ and students’ struggle with speaking as well as students’ lack of response indicated that English classes were not usually taught in English. That is, neither teachers nor students were accustomed to these sorts of teaching and learning practices. All the participants, too, frankly spoke that not only they but also most English teachers they knew, taught English mixed with Bangla.
Wadud commented, “English teachers frequently use their mother tongue Bangla in their classrooms. That’s why students arc not motivated”. He maintained that no skill could be achieved without practice. He said: “It’s a skill; it can be done only by practising that particular skill. So, it’s our responsibility to speak first, they will listen. When students will listen, they will feel the urge to speak.” Wadud, too, spoke Bangla in his teaching and he legitimised by saying, “Sometimes when students don’t understand, I use Bangla and sometimes when they can’t speak out their ideas in English, they use Bangla and I tell their ideas in English”.
Ali believed that students could not understand him and so he had to use Bangla. The following quotation of his indicated that Bangla was common in the English class and other English teachers of his school, too, taught English with the help of Bangla. He argued, “Most of my students cannot understand me when 1 speak thoroughly in English. They ask me to speak in Bangla”. He further added that although his students got good marks in English, they could not speak the language.
Kamal described the English teaching situation in the country by stating that teachers did not speak English even in the English classes other than reading out a text or asking questions from the textbook exercise. He added, “Only’ -topic is English but total discussion, conversation, and asking and answering is in Bangla.” Kamal further asserted that the English teachers of Bangladesh had satisfactory’ level of linguistic competence but they lacked communicative capability in English.
Abonti regretted that the English teachers taught English using Bangla. She said: “If we conduct the whole class in English they cannot communicate with us because different levels of students arc in the same classroom”.
All the six teachers commented that they had to speak Bangla because students could not follow their talking or instructions unless they were translated into the mother language but the interviews and the observations showed that three of the six participating teachers also lacked speaking skills in English although each of them had been teaching English for more than seven years. They often paused during teaching English fumbling for suitable words, phrases, and tenses of verbs.
The second identified barrier was the teachers’ tendency to prioritise accuracy. It emerged from the teachers’ interviews and observations that all the six teachers were inclined to value accuracy over fluency and they assessed students’ language skills for different reasons. One reason that was obvious from their interviews was that they assessed students’ language skills with a view to developing students’ linguistic competence. Ali’s aim of English language assessment was “to check the grammatical accuracy of students’ language.” Additionally he said, “A Bangladeshi student willing to learn English needs to memorise some important vocabulary and grammatical rules for accurate use of the language.” Ali went further by saying that most Bangladeshi students memorised answers to some specific questions to pass the examinations.
Wadud clarified the purpose of his students’ language skills assessment as ‘1 try to know whether my pupils use the language properly; and whether they can communicate using the target language’. However, it seems Wadud talked about the written form of communication because listening and speaking skills were not formally assessed in his school, either.
Abonti stated that assessment told her about her students’ progress. “We assess students to check where they are up to, I mean, how much students have progressed,” she said. Kamal expressed similar views: “Specially, I take some assessment of the students to judge their development and the ratio of their learning. This is the main thing we test the students.” Abu said, “We assess students to assess (measure) their ability or power, writing power” because “they have to communicate with someone else” using the language. All the six teachers attached importance to the accurate written form of the target language.
Despite the very real constraints faced by teachers, there was also considerable awareness of the need for curriculum change and willingness to embrace this. Wadud pointed out that the present curriculum did not have any provision to assess the listening and speaking skills of students.
(To be continued)
