Dictionary Use in CAT Exams?

Following on from the discussion in the Oct. 11^th HTU meeting on the role and use of dictionaries in Cumulative Achievement Tests (CATs), (a summary of which appeared in the October 21^st issue of News for the Week), we would like to invite teachers comments and opinions on allowing students to use dictionaries during CATs. The original purpose of allowing students to bring dictionaries to CATs was principally to lessen exam anxiety and encourage them to have and use dictionaries. Recently, we have begun to question this practice, not only because of isolated cases of students abusing the policy, but mainly due to the fact that high stakes standardized exams need to be administered under uniform conditions, which is not really possible when some students have and use their dictionaries during CATs and others do not. Added to this is the fact that certain reading CATs have guessing meaning from context that precludes the use of dictionaries, and others do not.

We would be interested in hearing your views on the subject in order to help us to shape future policy.

Thank You
Carole and Hakan

Is anyone listening?

 (Ayça & Jon ponder the skill of listening)

Discussion is often heated in the office but is something we both feel to be necessary for making sense of our own and each other’s ideas. Our current discussion topic is the teaching and learning of the skill(s) of listening at BUSEL. And here note-taking inevitably raises its head.  For us, note-taking is a key listening activity for our learners  and while it is something that will ostensibly help them in their departments it is an activity that presents challenges for learning.  Learners often find it difficult to develop this skill set. For one, they can have a hard time deciding what information is and isn’t important while they listen. The challenge is there for teaching too. Assisting learners to develop effective but individualised note-taking skills isn’t easy, particularly in an EAP context.  Subsequently, we, as a school, have developed an approach for our teaching in which we break note-taking into its subskills and teach these as ‘strategies’  because we believe these strategies will in due course help learners in their listening. We willingly invest this energy and we strive to understand just what happens during the note-taking process in EAP.   But do the gains in listening justify our efforts?  Aren’t there other ways of developing listening skills?  Extensive listening  would enable learners to increase the quantity of listening they do and improve their processing of aural texts.  With a little more teacher effort, learner listening can be personalised thus increasing the engagement.   With such an approach, learners will have a clear listening purpose; they will listen because they want to listen and learn.  And what’s more, extensive listening will facilitate the development of listening skills naturally and this will help lerners in their departments, which is our aim after all.       As we try to make our own sense of the skill of listening and how to teach it, we’d appreciate hearing our colleagues’ views.

 We’re all ears.