...is bad for children.

There was one of those Sunday morning debates on TV today that I tend to watch with half an eye, listen to with half an ear and process with half a brain. That's pertinent because the debate was about whether or not watching TV is bad for children. It's such a common debate that it's hard not to have to suppress a yawn.

I thought that the claim that British infants watch an average of six hours a day was unlikely but for the purpose of the point I want to make I'll accept it at face value. What struck me though was that some of the comments made mirrored almost exactly things I have heard before in other circumstances.

For example:

Watching so much TV, and using computers,  is bad for children's eyes.

Watching TV, and using computers,  is a solitary activity that deprives children of the interaction necessary to learn social skills.

Watching TV, and using computers,  is a sedentary activity that prevents children getting the amount of exercise that they need.

Watching TV, and using computers, is bad for children's emotional development as they never make any real friends.

And the circumstances in which I have heard them before?

About me when I was a solitary child who much preferred sitting reading a book to being out in the street playing football. They are exactly the kind of comments that my parents used to use to try to badger me into leaving the happy nest of my library-like room and go out into the big bad world to play with a lot of kids who liked me about as much as I liked them. Substitute "reading all the time" at the start of each sentence and you have the comments pretty accurately quoted.

I'm betting that at every point in history there has been someone saying that something is stunting kids physical and emotional development and I'm also betting that it's as wrong now as it's ever been.

Here we go again (providing we can look up the times)

Well, the Daily Mail do just love their hobbyhorses, don't they? Once again it seems that the foundations of our language are under attack from the forces of evil. What, I hear you ask, is it this time? Is it children texting? Is it misplaced apostrophes and split infinitives? Is it the President Elect using the word "enormity" to mean "extent"? No, it's none of these things, though I'm sure that editors at the Mail fume regularly about all of them.
This time it's the dumbing down of A-Level English exams by including such reading fare as tram timetables.
If there were any suggestion that the tram timetables were being used instead of other texts, perhaps as a replacement for Romeo and Juliet, then I would certainly be in whole-hearted agreement, but there isn't. They are simply being used as one of a wide range of texts. I teach English for a living, albeit to students for whom it isn't a first language. One of the Governments skills descriptors says the following at the lowest level (complete beginner)

"Rt/E1.2 recognise the different purposes of texts at this level"

and this, at the highest level (pre-University entrance)

"Rt/L2.2 identify the purpose of a text and infer meaning which is not explicit"

Examining the latter more closely we find "identify the purpose of a wide range of texts, whether inferred or explicitly stated" and later, under a different code "use organisational features and systems to locate texts and information".
This, remember, is how we teach high level foreign language speakers but apparently it isn't a skill that native speakers require.
That's plainly nonsense. Reading doesn't just mean reading the very best of English literature, it doesn't even mean just reading books be they good or bad. It means reading everything. It means locating information on bottles of aspirin, tomato ketchup bottles, Government information leaflets and, yes, tram timetables.
Texts are different and have to be approached differently. It would be as ludicrous to read a tram timetable from beginning to end in order as it would be to read Oliver Twist by taking random sentences from a few disparate pages somewhere in the middle of it.
One of the great skills of reading, that becomes instinctive over time, is knowing how to approach a text. A tram timetable is just as much a text as a newspaper article or a sonnet and knowing how to read it is just as important a skill, arguably a more important skill, as knowing how to read them.
As ever, in its rush to defend Victorian values, the Mail has chosen to make a sensationalist article out of something very trivial and ignored the true heart of the matter.
Of course another important reading skill is judging how much trust you can put in the things you read. I wonder if they'd consider that to be dumbing down.

.

So what were we testing?

Time for another rant about education, I think.

This week I was invigilating another exam, this time an ESOL writing exam, and I was thinking about how we test our students and whether the exams effectively (or even ineffectively) test what they claim to be testing.

Because I've been teaching an intermediate class who have been learning English for a couple of years that's what was particularly on my mind.

I was considering specifically the reading, rather than the writing exam. It's divided into three tasks.

The first of these is a form filling task. The more astute will notice straight away that this is more of a writing task, and indeed it is duplicated on the writing exam. It is meant to show that they can understand the instructions on a form. Now, there are any number of criticisms that I could level at the design of the task and the marking scheme, but I'd rather focus on whether such a task can ever achieve its aim, because I don't think it can.

Lets consider a typical form as used in these exams. First of all it doesn't correspond to the real world because the forms are designed for the exam and isn't complicated enough to be a real form. Nevertheless it is a form and it does have questions.

Typically the first few questions are Name; Address; Postcode; Telephone; e-mail. If there are any instructions accompanying them, they will be "Complete the form in capital letters" or "Complete the form in BLUE or BLACK ink". As often as not there are no instructions.

Now the second of these is going to be automatic. The students have already been told to complete the whole exam in blue or black ink. They can't fail that one. What about the other instruction? Well, I have had students whose sole knowledge of English was how to write their name, address and telephone number. They couldn't recognize them or read them but the could nonetheless write them. It's just about the first thing anyone learning English learns to do. The know that if they see "NAME" then they have to write a particular word. It isn't knowledge, it's more of a Pavlovian response.

As an aside, I once had a student who would take ages to write her name. Upon investigation I found that she didn't actually know the letters, she had learned to do it as a kind of drawing. It could have been anything. She wasn't writing, she was making a picture from memory of something she had seen.

Nevertheless, they do this so often that it ceases to be a meaningful test of anything. Incidentally the marking schemes – regardless of the instruction – usually says "Capital letters are used appropriately, for proper nouns etc." As they know that forms are usually filled in in capitals they can't get this wrong.

What about the rest of the form? Well, that depends on the specific exam being used, but it will typically include tick boxes (no understanding required – see a set of boxes, tick one), circle or delete questions (fifty-fifty whether they get that right), and a few boxes where they have to fill in other details (and that does indeed require them to understand three or four words – but usually very common ones).

And that's it. Not an adequate test of anything related to reading, in my view.
What about the other questions then?

These are based around reading texts. So far so good. They frequently have unfamiliar language in odd contexts but it's certainly arguable that the skill of reading includes coping with that. My main concern is the kinds of questions that are asked. While there are a few that are content based, (What time does the centre open on Saturday? List two of the dangers mentioned in the text.) most of the marks come from things that are analytical. They don't test understanding of the text, they test your ability to interpret points of view and write opinions based on your interpretation. Typically they include things like

How would you describe the language in the text?

What is the purpose of the text?

Do you think this text is friendly or unfriendly? Give examples from the text.

Why did Mr Smith write this letter to you?

One of my favourites, and a I'm paraphrasing a little to avoid mentioning the specific board, is something along the lines of "Give reasons why you think the loyalty card is a good scheme."

For that one, I once had a student say that he didn't think it was a good scheme. The mark scheme listed the answers that were acceptable – all "good" things taken from the leaflet. I marked it correct when he said it wasn't because it was to make him buy things he didn't want – in my view a far better answer than ANY of the ones I was supposed to accept. I even wrote on the paper why I had accepted it in case anyone queried it.

These questions are entirely subjective but it's worse than that. The answers are proscribed. You could write whole essays on them but that's not what's required.

Take the first one.

How would you describe the language in the text?

Think of a text and decide how you would answer it. Sorry you got that wrong. The correct answer should be friendly but formal, or perhaps friendly but businesslike.

Those are the answers on the mark scheme. Answering that question has nothing at all to do with reading and everything to do with having been taught what the exam requires. I could teach that you always write friendly but formal and they would be right 99% of the time without reading the text.

And that's the problem. This type of question doesn't encourage reading. It discourages it. Teachers can't just teach the students to read they have to teach students how to pass the exam. They have to be taught a list of possible answers (usually only two or three) and a strategy for picking one of them. I'm sorry but I don't consider that to be teaching English at all. At best, it's teaching exam technique. At worst, it's teaching a cheat's technique of how to maximise your chances of a pass without being able to read.

The student's aren't stupid and they pick up on it. I've frequently had students ask me why we have to keep on doing exam practice when they would rather be learning English. It seems that about a third of the year is spent on nothing else. The students resent it. I resent it and nobody benefits.

Give me a couple of days and I could produce a far superior set of exams on my own that would test everything they were supposed to be testing. Of course I'd never be able to get them recognised by the educational establishment and the Government but that just reveals what the purpose of exams really is, doesn't it.

(And later I may rant for a while about writing exams.)