::A Geek in Korea::

Imagine you are in a never ending conversation with people, but you can only ask and answer the same four questions. This is what it is like to be a teacher on  "Speaking test day", and it’s also what it is like to be a foreign teacher taking a taxi.  Just four questions, over and over until you are sick of hearing the words coming out of your mouth. In class I give the same questions to students, and in the taxi, I answer the same questions every day.

Our school had a "level adjustment test" today. I had to interview half the school by pulling them out of class, one by one, and asking questions based on their level and give them a grade based on their responses. Five minutes or less per head for five hours today.  I was told about what was going on yesterday and made up an excellent set of questions for students in the top five classes in the school. My coworker was in charge of making the questions for the lower level classes. No one told him what to do, what the procedure was for testing, or how to make the questions. I had to help him out, as the last thing I wanted to do was ask questions students couldn’t answer all day.

We broke the classes down by level, wrote nice, easy, generally open answered questions that the students knew the vocabulary to answer. The idea is not to stump the students, because giving a grade when there is no answer is much harder. The idea was that the students know the question, but the completeness and correctness of their reply is how we grade. Do the students know the answer? Is the answer grammatically correct and in a complete sentence? Those kinds of things determine what level a student will be placed, who will study together, etc. If someone has made massive improvements, they might be bumped up a level, or if someone is falling behind, they will be knocked back. These are the tests to catch those students.

I know how the students feel. Every time I hop into a taxi, I get the same questions over and over again too. Where am I from? How long have I been here? These are followed by a compliment about my Korean, then a more invasive or annoying question. I’m asked the same things over and over again, with slight variations in phrasing, intonation, and dialect until I’ve mastered my responses. This is misleading, as it creates a false impression that I know lots more than I actually do. When they start asking me harder stuff or things I haven’t heard before, my vocabulary fails me and I can’t answer properly.

That’s why I structured the tests as a series of more difficult tests on a sort of scale. With students that get farther, the test gets harder. For students that struggle, I try to make it a little easier, or stop as soon as I’ve covered the minimum number of questions. If you asked a person the same questions enough, they get good at a canned response. It’s mastery of a more diverse set of vocabulary, tenses, and grammar that shows a better grasp on a language.