Speak to Me

This week I had to do Speaking Tests with grade four.  Now, I have many qualms with the education system in England, don’t get me wrong, but the way students’ speaking is tested in Korea just baffles me. At my school, the students are asked to memorise a dialogue (typically six to eight short sentences) for each unit that we have covered in class.

Firstly this is a difficult task, no questions about it.  If I was asked to try and remember all that I would have to practise for hours and even then I’d probably still fail miserably.  And secondly, in my opinion, it’s utterly pointless and a complete waste of everyone’s time.  It is not a true reflection of how well these kids can speak in English.  It’s simply a memorisation test, testing how well they can remember some English sentences if they revise hard enough.  And how that’s going to help anyone, I’ll never know!

One example highlights this perfectly.  One girl performed very well on the test and I was surprised as I’d not remembered ever having a successful conversation with her in English.  After she’d finished I told her how well she’d done and asked, “Did you study hard?” (a relatively simple question, yes?) Yet, I have never seen a more puzzled look.  I asked again and she just stared at me blankly.  I smiled, she walked away and I was left to write down the ‘A’ grade that she had acquired despite her poor English speaking ability.

I spoke to the Korean English teacher afterwards making my thoughts on the matter clear.  She agreed with everything I said and agreed that it would be more useful to test the children in more of a conversational way.  She was really supportive as always and told me that next time we could try and combine both ways to get a truer reflection of their levels. 

But next time, when the results come back much lower than this time, will those results be made public?  Because what will that ‘look’ like? I’ve seen this hundreds of times before.  We’ll see what happens…