Entrance Tests Are Not My Friends
July 27th, 2006 by MarkSummer is here, and business is booming at First Step. More students have signed up for my first and second grade classes than I can teach, and fifty more are on a waiting list for our normal classes. Nearly every day, more students and parents are visiting or asking about our school. There is an unfortunate downside, however.
For some reason, regardless of how terrible their children’s English is, parents won’t just sign them up for a new class that starts from lesson one. Instead, they pretty much all take an entrance test to try to get into a more advanced class. So far, less than five percent of the students who have taken it have passed and been able to start from a second semester class. Sadly, few of the parents can accept this fact without spending 10-20 minutes pressuring me to put their kids in a higher level after having just seen their kids fail horribly. It absolutely blows my mind.
The entrance test includes an oral component and a written component. For we use an old semester one exam, minus the grammar section. The spoken part, which is what I base most of my decision on, is broken into three parts. In the first part, I ask the student several simple questions, such as “What’s your name?”, “Are you a boy?”, “Will you swim at school tomorrow?”, and “Is this your pen?”. Before starting, I tell the student to ask me if he/she doesn’t know what a word means, and during any tough parts of the test I try to figure out why a kid can’t answer. Next, is a spelling section. I say various words, mostly monosyllabic, and the kid has to spell them out phonetically. As always, I accept anything that’s phonetically equivalent to what I said. I start with simple words, such as “hat”, “hut”, “lack”, “leak”, “far” and “fair”; and then I get into more difficult words, such as “motion”, “weight (don’t use a)”, “bellow”, and “below”. This section is mostly to determine how well the student can tell various sounds apart, but the more difficult words also test familiarity of phonics rules. After the spelling section, is a reading section, in which the student has to sound out various words. Ideally, these words are all new to the student. I use this section to see what sorts of pronunciation and phonics problems a student has.
Since most students new to my school have only learned spelling through brute-force memorization, they really tend to struggle with the spelling section of the test. Quite a few have also been taught by Taiwanese teachers with fairly weak pronunciation skills, and they really tend to struggle with sounding out words in the last section. So, baring a complete catastrophe in those sections, I usually focus my attention more on how they do in the first section. Some of the students who were able to start from the second semester had fairly weak phonics, but were able to get caught up through taking some extra review classes on the side, and putting in a lot of extra time on CD homework. The truly frustrating entrance tests are those in which the kid bombs everything, and the parents are too proud to accept it… in other words, about half of them. Here’s a typical conversation:
Me: We’ll put little Johnny in a new class.
Parent: A new class?!? Do you mean from lesson one?
Me: Yes. He failed every part of the entrance test.
Parent: How about if we just review with him at home. Then could he start from a second year class?
Me: Well… if you can teach him the entire first year’s material on your own, then I guess you don’t really need my help. If his English is greatly improved when you bring him back, though, I’ll put him in a higher level.
Parent: Nononono, I mean have him start from the advanced class NOW and we’ll review at the same time.
Me: He couldn’t understand the words “walk”, “will”, “did”, or “lazy”. The second year class is reading a book about Amundsen and Scott’s race to the South Pole. How will he be able to get anything out of that class!??
Parent: Well, he’s already studied for four years at Hess. It would be a waste to start from a first year class now.
Me: Will it matter to anybody how good his English is when he’s grown up?
Parent: Of course!
Me: Will it matter to any of those people whether he studied here for three years or four in order to get to that point?
Parent: Uhmm…
Me: Look. I know how you feel. He’s spent a lot of time in class, and it’s frustrating to “start over”. But, all of the English he’s already learned is still useful. We really just need to fix up the weak points before pressing onward. It’s like building a house. If the ground floor is falling apart, can you just ignore it and start building a second floor? No, you’ve got to make sure the foundation is solid first.
Parent: Well… I suppose so.
In the end, they usually sign up for whatever class I suggest. The extended conversations it takes to get them to sure gets old quickly, though.. especially considering it’s unpaid work.
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July 27th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
I think you handle those situations really well. It’s not that the students don’t know anything, they just can’t string the bits and pieces of things they know together to make a complete thought. It is definitely frustrating to ’start over’, but in the end it works a lot better. When I first came to Japan, I had only studied for 2 months (however it was an intensive course that was supposed to be equal to 1 year of college) but was still disappointed when I was put in the first class. But at the same time, it really was the greatest thing for me in the end. I wasn’t a complete beginner, so it wasn’t all that hard. So I didn’t have to study hard to get good grades, meaning any studying I did was for perfection, not survival. I did really good, and it created a solid foundation to base further studies on. It also made me feel better when the other Americans in my class had studied between 2-4 YEARS and still ended up in level 1, and I still did way better then them.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Oh, you have these conversations with the parents in Chinese right? Just that alone should be enough to make them do whatever you want. “Oh what’s that? You know more about language learning then I do? Then why exactly am I speaking your language? Alrighty then, we’ll be doing things my way, because I’m clearly the one that knows what he’s doing.” (That would be Dave Chappelle as the Black English Teacher — see Black Bush if that doesn’t make sense.)
July 27th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
Yes, the conversations are all in Chinese. However, it’s kind of hard for me to use that as some linguistic trump card since nearly all of them also speak Taiwanese, some of them also speak Hakkanese. Heck, some of them speak Japanese, too. If there’s one thing that Chinese people really seem to kick ass at, it’s learning lots of languages. Now, if I moved to Japan and opened a school like this, on the other hand…
July 28th, 2006 at 5:17 am
It’s probably inaccurate to say “such-and-such race is good at learning languages” - if you are taught languages growing up (at home or at school), then the ability to speak those languages later is not really due to some kind of inborn skill, but thanks to years of learning. Europeans also speak 3 or 4 languages thanks to their education system, but I won’t make any comments about the “European race” being good at language learning
How many of these mothers speak fluent English is the question. A language completely unlike their own - whereas Taiwanese/Mandarin/Hakkanese are pretty closely related.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:12 am
I didn’t say anything about race! “Chinese” isn’t a race. I’d agree that some Europeans, such as the Swiss, enjoy some of the same language learning advantages that the Chinese have. I think the Chinese have even more advantages, though. For one, it’s easier to go from tonal languages to non-tonal languages than the other way around. There’s medical research showing that Chinese speakers use both sides of their brains heavily when doing language related tasks. Speakers of Indo-European languages, on the other hand, don’t significantly engage the right hemispheres of their brains when doing the same tasks.
As for English skills, back when I was in Taibei, a lot of the parents spoke pretty good English. Here in Guishan, none of them speak English that well, but even modest skills in a third or fourth language are nothing that I’m going to sneeze at.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:30 am
Sorry, I understood “Chinese people” and “race” to be more or less the same concept, my bad
Clearly, the Chinese have advantages due to their tonal mastery (the learning of which drives me up the wall!!) which us non-tonal speakers do not. I wonder if the tones are driving that right hemisphere…
My experience learning languages shows that motivation and dedication go a lot further than any innate ability. People I know say that I have a “gift” for languages, but I simply point out that languages are what interest me, hence I spend time learning them, hence I can speak them. No real evidence in there regarding any particular skill - perhaps I’m even slower than average, who knows?
Ian, of the Canadian race
July 28th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
There’s a chinese idiom to describe this kind of self-deceptive thinking — 打腫臉充胖子(trying to look fat and prosperous by beating up your own face). However, I strongly recommend not applying this idiom to any situation where parents are involved.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Re: having a talent for languages. If you have a good auditory memory and can sing on key when first learning a language, you will learn that language faster than someone who does not have these abilities. However, these abilities can be developed. I’ve been reading a book called The Learning Gap about the differences between American/Japanese/Taiwanese/Chinese elementary education. The Asian view does not discount inborn talent, but puts more emphasis on hard work believing that we can usually improve the abilities we were born with. Thus, because of my study of Mandarin Chinese, I am now able to sing on key (more or less) whereas before I couldn’t.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Interesting. I studied Mandarin for nearly a year for two hours a day and I still can’t sing at all. Maybe a tough case like me needs to study a really tonal language like Cantonese.
July 28th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
I can sing on key, but you still wouldn’t want to get stuck with me in a KTV booth
July 29th, 2006 at 3:58 am
It was really hard for me to learn the tones. I finally came upon a method that works very well for me: I paid a lot of attention to the ‘tune’ of tone pairs (I disregard the neutral tone, although I think I may use it subconsciously after hearing Mandarin for so long, since ‘87). So the first tone first tone combo has the same ‘tune’ no matter what the intials or finals are that make it up: same with first tone second tone, first tone third tone and on down the line. There are 15 tonal pairs in all:1/1,1/2,1/3,1/4,2/1,2/2,2/3,2/4,3/1,3/2,3/4,4/1,4/2,4/3,4/4. I highly recommend this way of learning the tones to ‘tone deaf’ people. First you should be able to recognize the pairs when a native speaker produces them in isolation, then you should try to imitate in an exaggerated way at first. Has anyone tried this method? I only started learning Mandarin when I first went to Taiwan- except for 2 weeks at a language school, i taught myself through listening, grammar books, conversation, and bilingual friends.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
v,
I used a similar method. I’m putting it up on my website soon.
July 30th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
v,
I don’t mean I have trouble with tones. I just mean I can’t sing… in any language.
John,
Me, too!
August 1st, 2006 at 12:21 am
I have a Chinese learner’s book in French which has at the start combinations of every two tones together which I worked on repeating and found very helpful. Once I started doing sentences though I found it wasn’t that easy to keep the tones right. Currently, I just repeat sentences over and over, at first slowly and then faster until it sounds natural and my brain remembers those combinations of tones I figure. It’s a work in progess.
August 1st, 2006 at 10:03 am
Mark, I have the same situation occurring in my school. In addition to parents hoping to leapfrog up a level (or two) because of misguided “face” issues, I get parents who want junior to study with his older brother, or have scheduling difficulties: “Junior has piano lessons on Wednesdays/Saturdays so the beginner class isn’t really convenient. Can we put him in the intermediate class on Monday?Thursday instead?” I always say it’s fine, but how does Junior deal with failure and low self-esteem? Because he will definitely experience both if I put him in the class they want. If parents insist, I’ll put Junior in the class they want for a trial month. If his scores/classroom performance aren’t good enough, he goes into the beginner class. They usually agree, and the kid goes through a month of struggling, nagging by the parents, poor self-esteem, and finally gets put into the programme he belongs, having acquired a real passion for learning English. Not. ~sigh~
July 7th, 2008 at 4:04 am
[...] this past week, I’ve been on summer break, minus a few entrance tests and other odds and ends to do in the office. Something odd happened while I was giving [...]