Oh do speak up

I can’t hear anything above 13,000Hz.

We conducted practice speaking tests last week in anticipation of the actual speaking some time around the middle of next month. There were four of us to do the examining, but we only tested the new Senior 2s in addition to the Senior 1 classes, which kept the whole thing to two days. Next time, though, there will only be three of us to do the examination because the boys failed the accreditation (including a qualified IELTS examiner), and there will be nearly two hundred students.

Speaking is a draining exam because the examiner has to concentrate for long periods of time listening to some unutterable drivel. By the end of the day it’s hard for examiners to maintain any sort of focus. They might suddenly recall that they’re meant to be paying attention, or they might pay attention and assign a particular mark only to forget quite why.

Students get themselves really wound up about the speaking. They haven’t done enough to improve their chances because in spite of ample opportunities to practise speaking English in class, they’ve never made any effort. The worst ones are the Nervous Noras who behaving like wet, wimpy 19th century virgins. These are the students (mainly but not exclusively girls) with whom it’s nearly impossible to interact in class, and who would flee screaming in terror if they could as a response to being asked a question in class. This is their problem because although the examiner may know that a student is nervous, there’s no compensation for it. As Phoebe in Friends once told her fiancé, “Strap on a pair!”

The Senior 1s averaged middling B, and the new Senior 2s nearly the same. (In fact, their averages, albeit for smaller numbers, were slightly lower.) What does that tell me? Some of the new Senior 2s ought to have been in Senior 1, I think. There have been some right lemons in my Senior 2 classes who have been out of their depth since the start and who, if I haven’t made them do the Core exam, are going to make fools of themselves in the rest of the mocks.

But like nervous students, the problem is theirs, not mine, and their general disdain for class has again revealed the deleterious effects of indolence in the course of the year. In my previous job I used to see the same, eventually concluding that Chinese English classes had no effect whatsoever on students’ English because they showed almost no progress in the course of the year.