Sarah

Elizabeth Colburn April 24, 2012 Practicum Case Study

Teaching to tests I dont believe in

Contexts
I am going to focus on two contexts for this case study, as there has been two times in the last year that Ive been faced with this situation. The first context was at an IEP called the American Language Institute, a part of California State University Long Beach. This program hosts groups of potential college aged students from all over the world, with the hopes that they will matriculate into the main university (CSULB) after a semester to a year-and-a-half of intensive English classes. I taught a level 1 grammar class and a foundation level (the level below 1) listening/speaking class. Both classes were full of Saudi Arabian men and women aged 18- 27. Both classes had a final exam that was written by the administrators of the program, and the teachers werent allowed to see the exam before we administered it to our students. We were only allowed to know the format of the exam and that it encompassed the main objectives the course was supposed to fulfill. The second context where I have been challenged by this circumstance is at the Salinas Adult School. The class I teach in is a mixed-level class that takes place M-F 8:30- 12:30 in six-week cycles. The students are mostly Mexican immigrants, with a Taiwanese woman, an Iranian woman and a Chinese woman. The goals of this course are to prepare these adult learners for real-life contexts in which they will need English to potentially get better paying jobs in the U.S. and just to function in a dominantly English speaking country. The test that students take in this course is the CASAS test. There are several components, but the part of the test I have been asked to prepare students for is the listening part. If students pass this test, the Salinas Adult School is given money by the government. This school is severely underfunded, and the money that comes from students passing this test keeps the school running.

Challenges
At ALI in Long Beach, all foundation level students in the program are given the same test, regardless of their teacher. However, each teacher is given a certain amount of freedom about what to teach, the vocabulary to cover, and how they want to assess students (other than this final exam). As a new teacher, I took this freedom and ran with it. I thought up fun oral presentations, played a lot of speaking games and tried to make the 2 hour and 20 minute class as interactive as possible given the low level of the learners. As teachers, we arent allowed to know what the topic of the test will be, so we cant be sure to cover the vocabulary that is presented in the exam. Also, the director of the program was the speaker in the video and she intimidated the students. Another challenge was that there ended up being a lot of reading involved in the listening test, although this class was not supposed to focus on reading skills primarily. The test- in my opinion- was way too hard for the learners! And it turns out that the director ended up talking about the history of

Sarah Elizabeth Colburn April 24, 2012 Practicum Case Study blue jeans on the test, using all sorts of vocabulary that the students had never learned (like rivets and slacks). The worst part of the test is that the students had a lot of difficulty simply comprehending the questions they were supposed to answer. I was not allowed to give them any help in deciphering what the questions meant. Much of her talk was in past tense, and these students focused mostly on present tense during the semester (remember this is a PRE-level 1 class). At Salinas Adult School, I sat in a room and listened to the listening component of the CASAS practice test, to get an idea about what the test is like. This listening test is one of the most inauthentic, decontextualized tests Ive ever listened to! The questions about the listening passage arent related to one another at all. Honestly, you have to be so engaged and high level (which a lot of these students arent) to understand how to listen to the directions. It reminds me of the Spanish listening quizzes that I used to take in high school. One example of an unclear statement used in this test is payroll used the wrong leave time. This is a culture test as well as a listening test, and many of these students work in the fields and have never been on a payroll. My challenge from my cooperating teacher was to create lessons that would prepare the students for this test in some ways. All of the activities that I wanted to create though (using authentic resources and real language use) didnt seem to be relevant to what they would need to practice to pass this test.

Reflections/Suggestions for Solutions

I realize that I must face the reality that situations like this will arise in my teaching career, especially if I decide to work in public education or in large institutions where high stakes tests determine placement and funding. My first solution in retrospect would be to make sure that the school, institution, or program that I start working for is in alignment with my teaching philosophy and values, and promotes exploratory, creative, content- based language learning. In the future, I will really research the tenets of a program before I commit myself to working there because I know that I will not be able to do something for very long that my heart isnt in. Reflecting back on my class in Long Beach, I should have focused more on teaching my students how to learn. I think that is a very important component of being a successful student in an environment where there are standardized and sometimes unfair testing practices. I would have focused more on teaching active listening skills, guessing from context, and would have given them more practice taking tests without my help. When I came upon this challenge in Salinas, I immediately reflected back to Long Beach and remembered that I wished I would have taught differently in that context, and I immediately realized that I must start teaching the students about active listening and help them to raise their awareness about their own learning and listening processes. I employed this strategy in a lesson that I taught in Salinas where I introduced students to the Speaker/Understander model that we learned in Practicum (Julian Edge, 2002). The whole lesson was focused on raising awareness about our listening processes and teaching the students practical skills that theyll need in order to listen actively. Hopefully this will help them to be able to listen with awareness- even when they do have to listen to inauthentic, decontextualized speech.