Monday - February 18, 2008

‘pass’ language exam without speaking.

Poor babies ... “too stressful?”
Where’s Drews bat?  I need it here.  Thought I wuz thru for the day but couldn’t resist this one.
Drew ... Please drop that bat in here somewhere.

Pupils ‘pass’ language exam without speaking
By Melissa Kite and Julie Henry
Last Updated: 11:22pm GMT 16/02/2008

Oral tests are to be axed from foreign language GCSE examinations because they are regarded as being “too stressful” for pupils.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will announce this week that teenagers will no longer have to demonstrate they can speak a language in the traditional oral exams that currently account for half the marks at GCSE level.

The decision to replace them with “continual assessment” by teachers was condemned last night as “dumbing down”. Key elements of the language exam have already been eroded under Labour’s reforms. Pup-ils can now pass French GCSE without writing a word of the language. The exam is dominated by multiple-choice questions. All that is required is to tick a box or to link phrases.

Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, said: “After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it. Once again this Government is moving the goalposts on examinations. Instead of proper rigour, we have got a watering down of standards.

“Language teaching is facing severe problems and our children’s capacity to succeed in an ever more competitive world won’t be helped if qualifications can be awarded without their actually acquiring proper skills.”

The decision to scrap tests follows recommendations in Lord Dearing’s Languages Review, commissioned by ministers last year. The report said oral tests were an unreliable measure of capability, and put pupils off taking languages.

It said “the present method was too stressful and too short” to be reliable. “We propose that these parts of the examination should be over a period through moderated teacher assessment.” Prof Alan Smithers, the director of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Education and Employment Research, said scrapping the test negated the whole point of gaining the qualification.

“The reason we learn a modern foreign language is to be able to speak it fluently and to be able to do so in all conditions,” he said. “Teacher assessment is notoriously unreliable when teachers are then judged in league tables on the exam results their students gain. If this is an attempt to boost results by making the exam more palatable to students, then it is misguided because we will be fooling the pupils, employers and universities.

“One consequence is that students going on to A-level who believe they are good at the subject, then find they cannot cope with higher-level studies.” In the long-established oral test, students converse for about 10 minutes with their teacher in their chosen language.

The exchange is recorded on tape and sent to examiners. In future, oral skills in lessons will be assessed by teachers who will award marks that will be moderated by examiners. It is not clear whether any oral work in class will be taped or how examiners will judge a teacher’s assessment.

The number of pupils taking modern language GCSEs has been falling since 2002 when the Government made them optional from age 14. Figures show that up to 1,500 secondary schools do not enter any pupils for foreign language GCSEs. At A-level, French entries have dropped by 20 per cent and German by 32 per cent in the past six years, raising fears that the subjects are becoming the preserve of the private sector.

http://tinyurl.com/2fj2yk

updated ... with extra battiness. Peiper, it’s the button that says *Bat on it in the second row, 5 buttons to the right of the blockquote button. This is some article ... no writing, no speaking. Do they even have to be able to read any fwench to pass, or have they lowered the standards so far that if the student can point to some cheese, a beret, or a crappy ugly car two times out of three, that’s french enough? (yeah yeah, if they know how to set the car on fire then they get an “A")

Posted by Drew458     on 02/18/2008 at 12:01 PM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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