270 Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?
Some of the different ways of testing achievement follow:
✓ True or false questions: These can be less stressful for students
because they test knowledge without necessarily involving writing skills.
✓ Gap-fill exercises: In this kind of exercise you strategically omit certain
words from a text in order to test particular areas of language.
Suppose you want to test your students’ knowledge of English prepositions.
You can cut the prepositions out of a text and provide the missing words
in the wrong order below the passage, or you can leave out the missing
words and make students come up with the prepositions on their own.
The words are provided in the following example:
Goldilocks went... the little house and saw a dining table... the left.
There were three bowls of porridge... the table and... each bowl there
was a chair.
on into in front of of
The missing words can be listed in the wrong order below the test as I
show here, as a multiple choice or just left out completely.
✓ Cloze: This is a kind of gap-fill but the omitted words are more random,
say every eighth word, so you get more of a feel for the students’ overall
knowledge of the language. Try this one:
Teachers select texts from published materials or... exercises themselves.
The advantage of writing your... tests is that you can make them...
relevant to your students’ interests.
write own more
✓ Matching: At lower levels especially, you can test vocabulary by matching
words to pictures or single items to the appropriate categories. You can
put a grammar slant on matching exercises by connecting sentences
to the right tense label, or perhaps the beginning of a sentence to the
appropriate ending. Figure 18-1 shows a matching vocabulary question.
✓ Dictation: Dictations tend to conjure up bad memories for some but
they needn’t consist of long dry passages. I find dictations very handy
for practising listening, pronunciation and spelling all at once.
Here is one of my dictation lists: cap, cup, cop, cope, cape, cob.
✓ Transforming and rewriting: In exams like Cambridge First Certificate
in English, students have to show their ability to change a word from a
noun into an adjective and rewrite a whole sentence incorporating a
particular word. That’s why teachers like to get students used to this
kind of exercise from early on. Take a look at these examples:
- Complete the sentence by transforming the word in brackets into
the right form:
