Why grade?
The goal of grading students is to establish their level of competency in a subject - isn’t it? Or is to measure their progress when compared with the results of a previous test? Or is it to measure the competency of the teacher? Or is it for the student to see how much better they are than their classmates? Or is it for the HR Manager to justify spending company money on an English course for its staff?
I would argue, with the exception of providing pretty numbers for the HR Manager to show their boss, that it doesn’t achieve any of these things.
Before I discuss grading in detail let’s rewind a little and clarify who my students are and what motivates them to learn a language.
I teach online private courses to professional thirtysomethings. They start because they need to be able to use that language for practical purposes: moving to a new country, using it in their existing job, to increase their chances of getting a better job or maybe a plum foreign posting. They don’t study a language to get a higher grade than their classmate. They don’t do it to make the teacher look good. And they don’t do it to make the HR Manager look good.
If a student learns all the rules and structures found in coursebooks then they will pass the test and get a good grade - hurrah! But real-life language doesn’t follow a coursebook. When I first started learning Polish I visited a post office and proceeded to use my new found phrases. The only thing I got from my visit was a blank look. Grading a student based on their ability to memorise a coursebook doesn’t assess the student’s ability to think outside the coursebook.
Why do we spend time grading students, and comparing them with other students, when we should be focusing on how we can help them in the real-world?
A truer assessment would be if the teacher, through observation of the student during a range of different class activities, believes that the student has the ability to use those rigid structures to help themselves. To be flexible in their use of the language. To play with it and be creative with it.
What is a good student?
A good student should be able to take those basic structures learnt in the protected environment of a classroom and make the small changes necessary to suit different real-world situations. A role-play in a supermarket should be no different than in a post office. Similarly, they shouldn’t panic when a post office clerk gives them a blank look.
Grading is open to misuse
In my experience, grading is also open to misuse by school administrators. They try to pressure teachers into assigning passing grades to students who are completely ill-prepared for the real-world. Let’s all keep the HR Manager happy.
Give them confidence not grades
It is important to assess the quality of learning and teaching. But reducing that assessment to numbers – number of grammar errors, number of verbs committed to memory, etc, is not the way to do it. In fact, measureable progress using numbers may be the least important aspect of learning. In terms of language learning, confidence in using the language is surely more important. A student might not know as many irregular verbs as their classmate, but if they can pick up the phone and, without hesitation, switch from their native language to their second language then surely they must be considered the better student.
How should we tell the world how good are students are?
Some teachers will say that they add comments to the grades. Let’s be honest students will ignore the comments and focus on the numbers. Additionally, comments are only added to justify the grades. Similarly, standard comments such as ‘Making progress’, ‘Showing improvement’, etc, is still grading.
Grading should start from a blank sheet of paper, and the pen used to write with shouldn’t have the ability to write numbers.
These days I only prepare students for the real world on a one-to-one basis, so it is easy for me to assess my students in an effective and realistic way that tells the real story of their abilities, or otherwise, in English. I must confess that I don’t have a clear idea how the method I use can be adapted to assess on a mass scale.
The two most important elements in teaching are the student and the teacher. Maybe here are a couple of clues to the way forward?
Firstly, after a few weeks of working with a student a teacher should know the personality of their student and how they will react in a real-world situation.
Secondly, you could ask the student about their confidence in using the language. How they feel they would cope if a foreign client suddenly rung them up. Which area of the language they feel weak in, and strong in for that matter. ‘Gary, you mean students grading themselves?’ Yes, I suppose I do.
A question for you
If we agree that grades in the traditional form don’t tell us what we need to know, and confidence and other similar intangible qualities are difficult to reduce to numbers, then how can we provide 10 or 100 or even, with the increase of massive online courses, thousands of students with a genuine and useful assessment of their abilities? An assessment that will give a third party a useful insight into that person’s ability in the real world.
Good grades don’t mean that a student is prepared for the real world. Giving the tools to a student to give them the ability to think is a real result.