How do we educate people? How one can check the abilities of an individual? Is it possible to give progressive analysis of a student when teachers evaluate their work ? Let's see how the testing works, what are the types of assessments and evaluation.
Ans: If the test is used multiple times and also cost-effective than it can be said that it is fulfils the practicality. Again if the test covers all the resources which are made available prior to the test, it is practical test.
3) What do you understand by backwash?
Ans: Backwash is an effect which happens after a testing and assessment. For example, if a student gets high marks or low marks, a student will think about the test negatively or positively. He/she will think about his/her own learning abilities also. This effect can be positive or negative also.
Washback concerns the impact of tests and assessments on materials, teachers, and learners. Thirty years of research has shown that testing and assessment have influenced language teaching significantly. (McKinley, Thompson)
4) Difference between assessment and evaluation
Ans: Assessment gives the whole idea about
5) How do you define good assessment?
Ans: A good assessment happens when it is done keeping in mind about
Thank You!
Work Cited:
McKinley, Jim, and Gene Thompson. "Washback Effect in Teaching English as an International Language." The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 2018, pp. 1-12.
There are many tools to measure a student's comprehensive abilities or any language components. While talking about English language, web 2.0 tools have become more advanced and user friendly to apply all the task based learning to digital platforms. Google for Education has launched several educational products such as Google Meet for online teaching, Jamboard for creating a handwritten notes and infographics, Google Forms for taking a unit end tests, Blogs to share reading resources and material to students and to write a thoughtful and deep thinking activity task given by teacher. But there are plenty of tools which have launched since many years back but still unnoticed to many teachers.
Let's take our classroom learning to another arena of digital teaching learning process.
What is Hot Potatoes?
The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source. The Java version provides all the features found in the windows version 6, except that you can't export a SCORM object from Java Hot Potatoes.
After 12th standard of schooling, nothing remains compulsory. Because university environment makes students free from boundaries. Colleges and universities make students free to make choices on their own.
The students become adults. Adults can decide on their own what, when, how and why things are important or unimportant.
To draw a rough analogy. . .
Schooling = The cook decides what to serve, when to serve, how much to serve. Eaters are not given choices.
Colleges and universities = Eaters decide what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat. Dishes are already prepared by cooks. (You are on your own).
Language teaching is an integral part of academia. Students should learn language not only for scoring good marks in exam but also to learn their usages and contexts. Because language can't be separated from any branch of knowledge, discourse and technical programs. The more proficient a student becomes in a language, the more chances are there for him/her to excel in different arena of academia. After all, language is a medium to express the things we learn. Not to mention, the importance of good communication skill is much in demand in all walks of life.
Every literature has possibility to teach language, be it a novel, short story, drama or poetry. It's all about planning a lesson and executing it among students. While planning a lesson, a teacher needs to keep in mind the age group of students, their cultural background and the first language they speak. Let's see how a language teacher can use literature for teaching English language.
For further resources and material click here to navigate to Dr. Dilip Barad's blog.
* What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using a 'novel' or 'short story'?
* Lesson: Teaching language through the short story from Malgudi Days written by R.K. Narayan
* Age Group: 18-20 Years College Students
* Pre Reading Task:
Teachers can ask students to gather the information about the village. Asking them to write 10 things in English about their village and read them aloud in class. This can help measuring the sentence formation and grammatical abilities of students.
* While Reading Task:
Teachers can ask students to read aloud some of the paragraphs from 'The Axe' from Malgudi Days. An example of the paragraph is given here. Teachers can circulate the handouts of the short story in class.
The
Axe
An astrologer passing through village foretold that Velan would live in a three-storied house surrounded by many acres of garden. At this everybody gathered round young Velan and made fun of him. For Koppal did not have a more ragged and godforsaken family than Velan's. His father had mortgaged every bit of property he had, and worked, with his whole family, on other people's lands in return for a few annas a week. A three storied house for Velan indeed!. . . But the scoffers would have congratulate The astrologer if they had seen Velan about thirty or forty years later. He became the sole occupant of Kumar Bagh - palatial house on the outskirts of Malgudi town.
When he was eighteen Velan left home. His father slapped his face one day for coming late with the mid day meal. Velan put down the basket, glared at his father and left the place. He just walked out of the village, and walked on and on till he came to the town. Is starved for a couple of days, begged wherever he could and arrived in Malgudi, where after much knocking about, an old man took him on to assist him in laying out a garden. The garden existed only in the mind of the gardener. What they could see now was acre upon acre of weed-covered land. Velan's main business consisted in destroying all the vegetation he saw. Day after day he sat in the sun and tore up by hand the unwanted plants. And all the jungle gradually disappeared and the land stood as bare as a football field. Three sides of the land were marked off for an extensive garden, and on the rest was to be built a house. By the time the mangoes had sprouted they were laying the foundation of the house. About the time the margosa sapling had shot up a couple of yards, the walls were also coming up. (Narayan. 136,137)
* Post Reading Task (Language Activity):
Language components such as adjectives, conjunctions and modal auxiliaries can be spotted right from the reading and a small exercise of the topics can be given in the form of fill-in-the-blanks. Exercises based on comprehension can be prepared.
Que: Find the similar word to assist.
Ans: help.
Que: Find the meaning of the phrase knocking about
Ans: Roaming without purpose.
Que: Find the adjective from the sentence given: He became the sole occupant of Kumar Bagh - palatial house on the outskirts of Malgudi town.
Ans: Palatial - Very spacious and large, well decorated.
Que: What did the astrologer tell to Velan about his future?
Ans: A passing by astrologer said that Velan would live in a three-stories house surrounded by many acres of garden.
Que: Find the modal auxiliary from the sentence: What they could see now was acre upon acre of weed-covered land.
Ans: Could.
* What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using a 'film or videos'?
Videos and films are a best support material while teaching literature. But, here language learning is at the center, so we can use video and films for that too. Watching videos and films has also become the part of learning activity. It has much to do with flipped learning model. According to the infographics mentioned in this flipped learning website, (click here to visit) two chemistry teachers in Colorado, USA, initiated this model in 2008.
To cite some words from Education Next,
Four years ago, in the shadow of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak, veteran Woodland Park High School chemistry teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams stumbled onto an idea. Struggling to find the time to reteach lessons for absent students, they plunked down $50, bought software that allowed them to record and annotate lessons, and posted them online. Absent students appreciated the opportunity to see what they missed. But, surprisingly, so did students who hadn’t missed class. They, too, used the online material, mostly to review and reinforce classroom lessons. And, soon, Bergmann and Sams realized they had the opportunity to radically rethink how they used class time. (Tucker, 2004)
Yes, this was the beginning of "flipped learning". Now, as we live in the cutting-edge latest technology and tools, teachers can have plethora of tools to teach English language, of course through literature as well.! Here are some of the tasks to teach language.
Task 1. Listening and Speaking.
In this task, teacher can share the prerecorded video to students or play the video or film in class and ask students to say few dialogues and lines just the way it is spoken in the video.
Here is an example of a film that can be listened and few dialogues can be articulated to learn English.
Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015)
Teacher can also ask students to read the subtitle of the film and to write few simple lines by pausing the video. After gathering the sentences, teacher can explain synonyms, adjectives, direct and indirect speech, active and passive voice or so. Here is the example.
Exact lines from film. (Timestamps given as per subtitles)
1. What's going on here ? (35:45)
Identify the tense and change the tense to past tense, without changing the meaning.
Ans: What was going on here ?
Task 2: Take Up the Lines, Think grammar.
There are many films based on the literary works. "The Importance of Being Ernest" is a good example. The film with the same name is quite faithful to this original play written by Oscar Wilde.
Teachers can give students the bookmarks of the pdf and the film. Students can listen to the dialogues and read the original play at the same time. It will improve their reading skill and listening skill.
Thank You!
Work Cited:
Narayan, R. K. Malgudi Days. Indian Thought Publication, 2006.
What do you think? Is literature to be written for the sake of moral preaching? Is it so that if literature doesn't tell the moral of the story, is it bad literature? What kind of literature is sold nowadays in market?
Well, these are the questions which every literature student can raise. Here in this blog, topics like globalization, self-help literature, narrative structure and problems of youth are discussed taking a popular novel by Chetan Bhagat, One Night @ the Call Center. Here is the link from which the topics are elaborated and discussed. https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2014/12/chetan-bhagars-one-night-call-center.html
Write on any two or all topics:
1. Globalization and on@tcc
The word itself suggests that it has something to do with global matters. But mostly this word has many connotations with business and economics. But what a literature student has to do with economics and globalization? Literature, as it expands its horizons through history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science. has connection with lot many other branches of studies. That's why humanities is multidisciplinary.
As far as this novel is concerned, there are some layers which touch this area in terms of globalization. In the global market there's a term called BPO which stands for Business, Process and Outsourcing. The
2. Self-help and on@tcc
Self-help literature is a genre largely connected with individual development. This genre contains books which help people, grow from within, make people motivationally charged up and ready to fight with emotional odds. Reading self-help literature may not give the sense of aesthetics, but it is full of moral values and anecdotal narration, which enables readers to work on their weaker parts of personality.
Taking a bird eye view of self-help books, the tone of these books seems to have similar voice and tone. Topics like success, failure, time management, money management, personal life developments, emotional intelligence can be are largely remain at the center.
If we look at the background of genre, self-help spans few phases of its emergence and development.
The first phase touched the secular world, which was largely based on religious books. Because religion was the base which made people wise by making things great. Things which were out of the control of human agency, were made superior by narration. Mainly the god was at the central figure in those books.
The second phase can be seen as literature as whole. The very purpose of literature primarily is to make people better and think on themselves. In this way it can be stated that all literatures are self-help. Even in today's time books based on self-help are sold more than any other genres. It has a huge market.
The third phase in self-help literature was based on writings of non-fiction. This was the phase in which the narration and guidance shifted from religion or god to one's own self. Samuel Smiles in 1859 wrote the first self-help book entitled 'self-help'. It's first opening sentence was popular and groundbreaking which read: "Heaven helps those who help themselves." In 1902 James Allen wrote 'As a Man Thinketh'. A quote from it: A man is literally what he thinks, his character being a complete sum of all these thoughts.
3. Popular Literature and on@tcc
Generally, popular literature has some shallowness in terms of lesser interpretations and further discourses. The word popular is used in a derogatory way for the literature which lacks high seriousness. Literature with high seriousness and abstract thoughts is considered as high brow literature.
What popular literature does not do ?
The term popular literature is to be seen as derogatory when ON@tCC is concerned.
