::A Geek in Korea::

One of the problems I’ve always had with speaking tests is making it high stakes enough for students to care about their results. In a class with ten students, only four might memorize something to recite. One or two will try to memorize something in the five minutes before class start, fail, and get caught. The rest will basically just give up immediately.

Students too lazy to commit to memorizing a few sentences usually view studying like a zero sum game. The more they study, the grumpier they become. If they can get out of a test more quickly by failing, and that also means they don’t have to study, that is what they’ll do. Even if this costs them a reward or gets the teacher angry, it means they still didn’t have to spend time studying.

I’ve tweaked my speaking tests to reflect this fact. Now, I give the students a full day warning. They know they have a test, as it’s their only homework. I tell them to prepare by listening and reading the sentences many times. Because I don’t give them any other homework, I tell them that their speaking tests must be perfect.

Then, I detail the new system for determining scores. Anyone that scores 100% on the test is finished. They can begin the puzzle, do other homework, or work silently. Anyone that makes a single mistake will write the topic once. Two mistakes means they write twice, and so on…
The maximum amount of times people can write depends on the length of the piece they have to memorize. Long pieces have more chances for mistakes, and cause hands to cramp when repeatedly rewritten. So far my limit has been five to seven rewrites for students that fail the test with no effort. One of the students was pushing for a ten time rewrite for complete failures, and ironically he failed his test entirely.

The important part of this style test is that you have the students write immediately after they fail in class and don’t let them do anything but write until they are finished. Then, all the students that did complete the task get a word search or puzzle to work on. That’s something students like doing in teams. If students who are writing get left behind, they’ll have to do all the work by themselves, meaning they’ll have even more to do.

The test works because the students hold their fate in their own hands. You have to administer the test fairly, because students monitor each other like hawks. The glee bad students get finding a mistake in a good student’s speech is matched only by the glee of the good student watching a bad student write a ton of times. Students help enforce each other’s punishments, which makes it easier on me to check on people.

The level my students now put into memorizing their work has increased dramatically. Students will come into my office to practice their speeches before class start so they don’t mess up in front of their peers and be forced to write. Some of my students said that they thought they really knew the speech until it was time to get up and say it. Once they felt the pressure, it all was forgotten. I can’t get that in my normal speaking tests. It’s also great for review, and had helped me slow down the pace of a few classes before I burn through all my material for intensive classes.