Listening comprehension in ordinary life does not consist of true-false statements or multiple choice alternatives. So the whole process of testing is a bit artificial. But these two exam types come in handy because the answers are so easy to check and mark. Checking can even be done by a special machine.
Open-ended questions are closer to real-life situations. If the teachers are provided with a set of sample answers, marking becomes much faster and reliable.
Tips for listening comprehension in exams
Listening comprehension exams can be very stressful. However, we can make the situation much more comfortable if we teach our students some strategies or give tips how to deal with the situation.
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Trial and error -method sometimes works beautifully. But would it not be better and quicker to give these people advice how to learn to swim than let them try it out themselves. The same applies to learning to read at a deep level – the students need to realize what they are doing wrong and which new strategies they need to start applying.
When applying CLT ideas in helping my students improve their reading skills I made a few startling discoveries.
The first one was that I have no way of knowing what goes on in the heads of my students when they are reading a text. The ‘quality’ of reading was hidden from me.
Secondly, as a result of this discovery I realized that the reading process is different for every one of us and the difficulties may be caused by many reasons and I as the teacher had no clue of them.
Thirdly,I had not helped my students enough to find the causes to these difficulties or to find a remedy for them. It had been like ‘Read more and more and you will become a better reader’ OR even worse ‘Throw the child into the water and let them learn to swim little by little’.
Fourthly, I realized I can make a difference in my students’ reading comprehension only indirectly; I had to make changes in what happens in my lessons and what kind of advice and guidence I could offer my students.
Move the arrow button to see the two options: Is reading a text a relaxing experience or is it filled with fear of not being able to overcome the obstacles on the way?
I had always insisted on my students studying the new chapter at home in advance. So the foundation for reading comprehension was there. It had actually been laid in the elementary school and with some students in the junior high school. When starting to apply CLT ideas in my ‘teaching’ of reading I first made a few important changes in my lessons.
I began to use differentiation in my lessons and replaced me asking questions about the text by giving my students 3 options how to ‘check’ reading comprehension. See Point 4 in Reading strategies below
The check was always done orally in pairs or groups, not with the teacher. So I combined reading with speaking. Reading comprehension became part of speaking practice. See more detailed account in ‘Deepening understanding of text, Part 1’
I started to teach more and more about various strategies how to improve reading skills and how to cope withexams as well. This idea led directly to improving writing skills as well.
The most striking example of the importance of education and reading skills that I have come across in my life is what happened in Oman in 1970 when Sultan Qaboos became the ruler and turned the uneducated nation into a modern cililized country merely in 50 years.
Introduction to receptive skills and reading strategies
As I have stated earlier on that receptive skills (listening and reading), are much more difficult to teach than productive skills (speaking and writing). Speaking and writing skills can easily be measured against a criteria. In contrast, listening and reading take place in the heads of the students and we have no physical evidence on the quality of understanding.
Listening comprehension can be verified only indirectly by checking if the listeners responses make sense in the light of what was said by other people. The other way is, of course, by having an exam.
Reading comprehension is even more challenging because people often read silently on their own and there are seldom immediate situations where understanding is checked in normal life. We rarely challenge the information someone has read about. Besides, interestingly enough research has shown that the process in decoding written messages is different among recipients and may even result in arguments about the content.
The most important thing for teachers is to make the students aware of their own reading processes, strengths and weaknesses, and also of the ways other readers approach a new text. Pair and group work as well as various reading strategies serve as tools for raising the awareness but they are also keys to the remedies, keys how to improve one’s own reading skills.
Nevertheless, the situation is far from being hopeless since we can teach about reading indirectly and most of my other articles on reading deal with strategies that serve as tools to enhance reading skills of ordinary and examination texts.
The other articles related to READING COMPREHENSION are
Reading
Reading comprehension strategies in class
Solving reading difficulties
Reading strategies, an example how to teach them
Reading strategies, spotting main ideas
Strategies to be used in exams and a model lesson how to introduce them
Sample exam for reading comprehension
Deep level reading, returning the markes sample exam
These other articles under heading READING demonstrate …
how important it is that the students themselves become aware of the reasons why they do not always understand a text or succeed in the exams and what they need to do to overcome the difficulties
how complex the process of reading actually is and how differently readers may approach an ordinary or an exam text and how versatile the difficulties they encounter may be
how the students can make use of various strategies during the exam to get better results
how to organize the lessons after the exam has been taken and the exams are returned to the students
One of the keys to the students’ success and improvement in reading comprehension exams is to devote a couple of lessons to the strategies when you get a new group.
Throwing the students one exam after another and assuming that massive input will automatically improve the reading skills for an exam, does not necessarily hold true.
In the previous articles I hopefully gave a lot of food for thought about preparing the students for exams.
All language skills are intertwined. Thus many of the tips given on listening comprehension, writing tasks and learning vocabulary apply in taking reading comprehension exams too.
The text below is a sample exam for those who are about 15 years of age. The idea is to let them take the exam either before or after the strategies lessons. The exam hasA) True/False-questions, B) multiple choice questions and C) a task combining reading with writing and justifying opinions.
The next article after this one is an example on how a mature 16-year-old might be able to process this exam.I will also give the ‘correct answers’ there with some recommendations on how to organize the return of the ‘test’.
I believe that if the students are allowed to use and apply the strategies handout in doing this exam they will internalize the ideas more profoundly. I am talking about the handout and articles in the previous article. And the student may become better writers too since they will learn to anticipate the reactions of their readers better.
Still, learning to apply the strategies does not take place over night. It also requires a lot of practice.
Up to 113 million children worldwide do not have access to school books. What a waste it is that old school text books are binned or pulped. Books written in Arabic will, of course, be of no use in most of Africa but English is an official language in Tanzania, for example. Moreover, all secondary education is done in English there and children are taught following the old British O- and A-Level curricula. Due to the way syllabi in Tanzania mirror the old English system, second-hand course books are perfect to help bridge the gap between rich and poor nations.
In Tanzania educational resources are scarce but children have the will to learn. An organisation based in Liverpool is working hard to see that school text books and other equipment are collected and re-distributed. The Tanzanian Book Appeal would be nothing without the help and support of schools, many of which have been involved in fund raising activities as well as donating old books. John, one of the students involved in the project, says that before the fund raising he didn’t really know or even care about Tanzania. Now he understands that Tanzania is the fourth poorest country in the world, and that there may be up to 40 pupils sharing one text book.
Once the books have been donated they are collected in a truck and taken to a holding warehouse – which was donated by a local business – sorted through and stored. They will be packed up and shipped off to Tanzania in a big container. The students who have worked on the project will then fly out to meet the books over there. The government in Tanzania have loaned government vehicles to sort out the distribution. The group of English students and teachers will then tour the schools in the Kagera region near Lake Victoria.
A Decide whether the statement is true (T) or false (F). Correct the false statements.
In Tanzania there are 113 million children without school books.
In Tanzania all education starting from the first school years is done in English .
The curricula in Tanzania follow the old English model to a great extent.
In Tanzania there is not a lot of money to organize teaching.
An organization in Liverpool gathers secondhand school books and forwards them to Tanzania.
The aid organization does not need the help of school children in its work.
In Tanzania there may be as many as 40 pupils in one classroom.
B Answer the multiple choice questions. Choose a) b) or c)
8. What happens to the school books once they leave the donating schools?
a) They remain in an old lorry until a storage warehouse is found.
b) They are sent to Tanzania in small units with goods from local businesses.
c) The books that have been given away are taken into storage and sorted in Britain.
9. What happens to the books when they reach Tanzania?
a) A group of students from England will go and distribute the books in Tanzania.
b) The schools have to pay for the transportation of the books.
c) The British students travel on the trucks to the schools.
C 1 Why are British secondhand school books ideal for Tanzanian schools? (Give 3 reasons and answer in your own words in a full sentence or two.)
2 What do you think about the procedures of getting the books to schools after they have arrived in Tanzania? (Mention 3 opinions and why you think so.)
The ‘correct’ answers with detailed analysis are to be found in the next article.
Africa at its best. Karin Blixen’s home near Nairobi. Blixen wrote famous books about her life in Africa.
Before you look at my next article about returning this sample exam, please ponder on the questions below.
How would you organize immediate student-oriented feedback after a reading comprehension test?Background info: The test was 30 min long, 6 multiple choice questions and 4 open-ended ones. A mixed-ability class, 16-year-olds and onwards.
What would you say to the students about the purpose of the exam-returning session?
How do you organize the feedback session right after the test?
Grouping the students? Making it a student-centred learning situation?
How to provide a model how to approach the questions?
How to deal with multiple choices?
How to answer open-ended questions?
When do you give the correct answers and to whom?
Various options to deal with low-achievers, i.e. How do you deal with differentiation?
In the previous article I pointed out that reading takes place in the heads of the students and we have no physical evidence on the quality of understanding. Besides, in general people are reluctant to admit that they did not understand what was said or written.
For this reason I have always tried to make sure all my students know how to study a new text beforehand at home. Once the students start to think in English, there is no need for any translations. If the students come to classes unprepared there simply is not enough time for most of them to understand the text well enough to learn from it. I have found the teaching of study skills and strategies more and more important over the years.It is a wonderful asset in CLT classes.
In the mid-1980s I had a rather weak new senior high class and I discovered that seven out of 30 of those 16-year-olds did not understand the texts in our textbook at all. So I made them sit down and translate texts with me once a week while the others were working independently. I felt embarrassed and so did my students. I simply told them what I expected them to do at home and demonstrated how to do it.
In addition, I told them that they could leave the group and study with the others the minute they could prove they have no difficulties any more in translating a text into Finnish. It took five lessons and all seven students learnt how to get prepared for my lessons. After that we did not have to translate any of the texts. It was taken for granted that everybody has to understand the new texts at the beginning of the lesson.
Reading strategies to be applied in class
Provided the students have done their homework and studied the next chapter beforehand, we can quite quickly move on to the stage in the lesson where the understanding of the text is checked.
The change that CLT brought along was that I started to use the textbook chapters as a stepping stone to free speaking. Understanding the text and doing written exercises was not enough. I started to differentiate the activities in class which lead to the students checking understanding ORALLY in many ways in pairs and groups.
At its best reading comprehension is linked seamlessly to speaking freely in pairs or groups. There are many ways to do it. I have already discussed these matter in ‘Deepening understanding, Part 1’ but I will rephrase the main points here. Many of the strategies I discuss under deep-level reading in exams can be applied in reading ordinary texts too.
‘Question-answer’ technique (QA): if you use ready-made questions, have them on the screen and let the students answer them in pairs. After all we teachers.already know the answers so the only reason for asking these questions is to get the students talking; this is an intermediate stage on our way to free speaking. N.B. If we ask the students’ opinion about a text, it leads to free talking: To what extent do you agree with the ideas in the text? / What is the most interesting and boring part of the story and why?
Replacing one-student-answering-the question-at-a-time with pair work means the activity level soaring towards 100 %. But CLT teachers are not pleased with this situation. Why not? Because the answers can simply be read from the text, which means the QA is ‘mechanical’ and our aim is to move via semi-communicative tasks to free speaking.
However, there are other ways than questions to test reading comprehension and have the focus on free talking. I have discussed True-False tasks, Multiple Choice tasks, Explaining the story with the help of pictures or mind maps (= my favourites) and especially differentiation in reading skill in article Deepening understanding, Part 1.
My way of realizing differentiation is very simple. For example, if the topic of a chapter is ‘Sports’ and we are on the verge of checking understanding of the text, every student chooses one of the 3 tasks and works with others who took the same level task. The tasks are: A) Answer the questions on the screen and work in pairs B) Explain about the content of the chapter in your own words , use the key words on the screen if needed. C) Have a discussion in pairs or in groups about your sport experiences and what sports means to you.
Some students insist on doing A, B and C. Others A and C or B and C. It is all the same for me. All I demand is that they work actively all through the lesson. Not for me, but for themselves.
As you can see I have minimized the extra work for the teacher in this A, B, C style of invisible differentiation. Invisible in the sense of no stigma on any student. Now the students work at a level that suits and pleases them.
I can sense some of you are wondering ‘How can I be sure my students understand the text correctly?‘. A justified question. My answer is. You can never be sure of it since you can observe it only from outside. Your students will ask each other or you if they do not grasp part of the text. Mostly they simply rely on each other’s help.
Intensive and extensive reading
Intensive reading
In a narrow sense ’intensive reading’ is what we normally do with textbook texts: study them in detail trying to understand the content properly. Sometimes we may look at the vocabulary and the structures more carefully too. I suspect many teachers have never really stopped to think about the various stages and strategies that take place in reading.
at first reading is based on translating the text into the mother tongue, aloud, silently in the head orlike I do with weak readers: force them to write the translation in their notebooks or the translation of new words between the lines in the text, this goes on for a few weeks or months until the students realize they simply have to do it
beginners’ reading pace varies a lot while they are reading a text and they tend to stop and go back and forth in the text, which is quite normal
beginners are mostly provided with simplified texts in their books to avoid frustration due to the language being too difficult, still they shouldbe encouraged to read authentic texts at least in their free time
at an advanced level the students start to think in English, no translations are needed any more and authentic texts can be used as a source of information at least in projects
advanced students should be taught how to make use of various strategies while reading texts, many of the strategies can be taught to younger students too
however, there are always a number of students in all age groups who work through translation, which slows down the reading process a lot so teaching effective reading strategies is of vital importance for them in particular
In a wider sense ’intensive reading’ covers the study of many types of texts and genres often followed by a set of tasks to be done. There are two types of reading tactics depending on what kind of information we are looking for. Both ‘scanning’ and ‘skimming’ a text are very useful skills later on in working life too.
We often ’scan’ texts to find a particular answer or a detail.
On other occasions we ’skim’ the whole passage or text through to get an overall idea about the text.
Extensive reading
’Extensive reading’ means reading for fun,reading because we enjoy the content or the story as such. Present-day media offers everybody a massive number of sources for extensive reading: in addition to library books we can make use of the internet which is full of interesting texts. It does not really matter what the students read as long as they are interested in the articles or texts. This kind of internal motivation guaratees learning and takes place in a relaxing atmosphere. In brief, the more there is INPUT, the more the students learn.
It is a good idea to let the students sometimes read whatever they want in class and then tell others what they find interesting in the texts. Some read only short newpaper articles, others may leaf through a thick novel. Encourage all of them to keep on reading no matter what.
I hate to admit it but during my time at school song lyrics were the only extra thing I read on top of textbook chapters. The first book I read in English was the university entrance exam novel ‘Brigton Rock’ by Graham Greene.
These days one of my most popular sources for reading is ‘onlinenewspapers.com’ where you can find hundreds of newspapers in English and other languages from all over the world. And I let the students read whatever articles they want, take notes and then summarize the content orally to their group or occasionally for the whole class.
The more there is INPUT, the more the students learn. The main thing is that they enjoy the texts and the content. Internal motivation to read is best!
