discusses some way to test university EFL conversation cours

This article discusses some way to test university EFL conversation courses; and show the advantages of pair work in the courses. Pair work may be successfully applied as an exam.

There are three common formats for testing the courses:

  Written exams
  Interviews
  Pair work conversations or pair communicative activities
Written Exams

Advantage: 1, efficient (all the students can have the test at the same time)     

2, there will be an easily comparable written record of answers

           3, less subjectivity

4, in may be 2 hours exam, it can test for many language structures

But, obviously written tests do not test for speaking ability. 

Interviews

At least it is a kind of oral communication. It is more suitable for the conversation courses.

Disadvantages: limitation of time

As for the students, each student only has six minutes of time for testing.

Six minutes for 30 or 40 percent of the student’s grade puts a lot of pressure on the students to perform in a very limited amount of time.

As for the teachers, having a conversation with a student and evaluating it at the same time is also a hard task.

Pair Work Conversations have a lot of advantages

1, the instructors can pay closer attention to the production of each student and have longer to evaluate and comment on each student’s performance.

2, the students can interact on each other

3, it can apply both in class and in the exam. So it is better integrated整合into the course. Students may have more incentive刺激的,鼓励的to be attentive and use class time effectively.

4, oral pair work exams are much more relevant相关的,切题的,中肯的than written exams or one-on-one interviews.

5, it also be benefits in regards to student motivation.

Example of Pair Work Testing

30% Attendance and Participation, 20% Oral Project, 20% Midterm Exam and 30% Final Exam.

The Classes focus on communicative activities and spent little time on reading and grammar based activities, using task-based pair work and group activity of each unit.

Making the Exam

Two ways of administering the exam;

a) giving the pair work tasks at the time of the exam,

The author decided on the latter for a few reasons.

But I prefer to give the tasks at the time of the exam because this may show the real capability of the student. I think we should test how the students use the foreign language not how they prepare for the exam.

Future research could investigate this more formally as well as answer other questions such as:

What are the factors that lead teachers to choose a given test format?
What are the positive and negative washback effects (including attention and motivation) in class from a chosen test format?
What are the factors to consider when designing and evaluating student performance on pair work tests?
It gave us some topics for the exam. The final grade depend on you performance—if you spoke clearly, no unnecessary pauses, native-like pacing, no unnecessary repetitions