Regarding assembling and
scoring tests, I have to say that the aspect that call my attention the most
was the following statement made by Genesee and Upshur ‘The instructions
themselves should not be a test; in other words, instructions should be clear and
meaningful to students’(201).
This statement made me
remember that somewhere I read that instructions are not the time to assess our
students’ language ability to figure out what we expect them to do in a task.
Instructions are not intended to be tricky because we are not trying to know
how good our students are at solving puzzles, but our aim is to collect
reliable information about students’ language abilities.
For this reason, we should keep in mind that because of unclear instructions our students may feel frustrated and their performance would be affected.
Furthermore, in order to succeed at giving
proper instructions for tests and that those lead to the information we want to
gather from our students, we have to keep in mind that instructions are our way
to guide students towards a successful performance of the task. To do so, we
need to be clear of what aspect of language we want our students to focus on; otherwise, they might end up doing something that does not really correspond to what we are asking them to do. Consider the following example:
Finally, I would like to share some of the experiences I have had with instructions. I'm going to start with one that I think most of us have experienced, I have written my whole name and then figured out that I should have written my name and last name separately. I have chosen the right answer, when I was supposed to choose the wrong one. I have circled, when I should have underlined... And many of the like. Now, please share your experience with instructions or maybe with instructions you gave and your students did wrong.
Maritza, you know that my research project is based in creating the habit of reading instructions, and last class I did what all of you recommended me to do in my class (creating a chaos)to make students read instructions. The instructions given in the worksheet were simple, clear and straight to the point, but anyway they did not read instructions. When applying a chec klist to my students some of them replayed: The teacher I had used to tell me what to do, that's why I didn't read them, I was waiting for your to tell me. I was like O.O and I inmediately understood that it is not only a matter of making students consiuos about the importance of reading instructions or devicing well instructions but also that this problem is bigger than what I thought. We must stablish routings with children. a strategy I' m using is to include in the classroom rules, read instructions. I ask for this rule every time they are going to be provided with any activity.
ResponderEliminarThat's so true ! Students expect that we always tell them what to do without them doing the effort to read the instructions.
EliminarI think that this is a shared fault. On the one hand, it's students' fault because they don't make the effort to be more autonomous and instead of doing their job, reading the instructions, they wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. On the other hand, it's teachers's fault because in our desire of giving the best to our students, we do some of their job.
Your idea is great! Thanks for sharing it :)
Even if some people do not agree with the use of Spanish in the classroom i do think that it is really really useful and important when giving instructions and when checking if students understood the instructions given.
ResponderEliminarNowadays, After having seen that students get very confused when hearing instructions, I am using the following strategy. When I have an exercise in class or an exam, first, I read the instruction in English, then if I need it, i use body language or gestures, and at last, I ask one student to tell me in Spanish what he/she understood.
I think it is a way to help students comprehend instructions, and little by little, to get familiar with the vocabulary used for instructions until one day, they will be able to do it without much help.
Juli, I agree with you. There's no reason why we should not use Spanish for helping our students understand something. I would rather use Spanish than see them frustrated because they can't understand.
Eliminar