Are we in a regression time?

Brown (2000) started chapter number 9 stating that “Not many centuries ago, writing was a skill that was the exclusive domain of scribes and scholars in educational or religious institutions”, and after that he also wrote: “today, the ability to write has become an indispensable skill in our global literate community” (p.218), which indicates, according to him, that things have changed and the writing practice is now performed by more people.  However, I think that although things have changed, there is not much difference from then to now and people still do not write and leave that practice only for people who publish books, teachers or linguists.

I do not want to blame somebody for people’s lack of writing, but I could dare to say that that lack of interest in writing comes in most of the cases from teachers that do not encourage and motivate their students to write. I know and I really think that instructing writing is hard work and I have experienced that. Besides, I think that it is harder to teach and guide responsive and extensive writing which require more time, more knowledge and more tools from both, the teacher and the writer. Nevertheless, I believe that we as teachers have to find the way to make students like writing, motivate them and show them the benefits that the writing practice has, benefits such as: learning more about the language, sharing ideas and points of view and improving more their writing skills.

Writing is necessary if we want to succeed in the learning of a foreign language. For that reason, it is important to instill writing practices into students since the first stages of the learning process.

Assessing Speaking: another hard task

When talking about assessing my students' performance, I have always found that the speaking and writing part are the most difficult ones to grade; and I had not stopped to think of the reason why that was happening to me. It is just now that I start to realize that the main problem for that was the lack of setting the objectives and knowing what I really wanted to measure.

I had not taught for a long time, and when I did it, it was just like for 6 months, but after having to design some tests and having to grade them I noticed that I was not doing the right thing. In the case of speaking, I made some mistakes such as:

·        I did not know what I wanted my students to do: I just came up with the 20 questions I was asked to submit with the test. I started to review the book and make all the possible questions but I did not focus on the functions I wanted my students to perform.

·        I did not have a good organization: I did not set a time limit for everyone. Some of them had more time, some of them less.

·        It became a mess when I had to grade because I did not know what to grade and how much “points” I should give to pronunciation, how much to fluency or how much to grammar.

·        As a consequence of the former, my subjectivity started to appear but not in a good way. Honestly, I was not being fair with some students. After having graded everyone’s speaking performance I started to compare results and I started to think like this: This student has 4 and he is not good when performing during the class, but this other one had 3.2 and he is very good, so at the end I started to give more points to the second one in order for him to have a better grade; and to take away points from the first one, just like that, without reasons.

 I think I am not the only one who has felt this way, and I have been able to reflect on that thanks to the information of the book we have been reading. Now I am sure I will spend more time designing my tests, I will do my best at planning the goals I want my students to achieve, and not only with the speaking, but with all the skills, I will try to take into account different performances of my student during their process when evaluating, instead of being focused on only one piece of information.