TEM 4 exam

Test for English Majors Grade 4

This is the major exam that all Sophomore English majors are required to take at the beginning of April. It has sections that test the student's listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills. Although I can not speak for the reading and writing portions of the exam, I can give some hints about the listening and speaking parts. I find that my students typically struggle in three major areas. Two of them are listening and one is speaking. The first and perhaps the most problematic area for my students is the NEWS section.

This section of the exam involves the students listening to several VOA or BBC newscasts and answering questions that are either fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice. To help my students prepare for this portion of the exam, I have them listen to a podcast called "Deutche Welle: Asia Compact." This is available through iTunes under the podcast section or you can get it online from http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,266,00.html you just need to search for Asia Compact. I recommend getting it through iTunes because the Chinese government tends to block the Deutche Welle English homepage, although you can get to it through a proxy. I use this one because it involves speakers with many accents and they tend to speak slightly slower than CNN or BBC newscasters do, but faster than VOA newscasters. While they are listening to it, I have the students answer 2 or 3 questions about each news section. This ability to listen and write an answer at the same time comes into play in a much more focused way in the second problem area.

The second listening area that my students tend to struggle with is the dictation portion of the exam. For this there are myriad websites that can assist teachers who need to get their students to be able to listen and write at the same time. One that I particularly like is http://www.englishclub.com/webguide/Listening/Dictation/ as there are several options and difficulty levels. The TEM 4 exam will read a short essay of two or three paragraphs to the students four times. Once at almost normal speed, twice at really slow speed, and the final time at almost normal speed again. Another good website for dictations is http://www.dictationsonline.com/ . All you have to do is play the dictation in class. Most of the websites will read the exercise three times; once at normal speed, once slow (with punctuation) and a final time at normal speed. This makes the practice harder than the actual exam, which I think is a good thing.

The third problem area for my students tends to be in spoken grammar. This is because they do not practice English outside of class except occasionally in e-mails or text messages to their instructors. As a result, they have very poor spoken and written grammar. Since the one is directly related to the other, I force my students to use good grammar in their homework by taking away points for gross mistakes. This was a shock to many of my students at first, but now they are beginning to get the point. Another good thing to do is to have them recite speeches or short stories to the class. This way they hear themselves speaking and using good grammar and are more likely to correct themselves.

Exams and Standardized Tests

Here in China, they place a huge emphasis on exams and standardized tests. Beginning in primary school, students are taught how to pass the state exams. The higher the average scores for the schools, the higher their status and the more benefits they can get. This continues right up to the university level. Students majoring in English are required to pass certain exams before graduation. These exams are usually the TEM (Test for Emglish Majors) 4 and 8. The TEM 4 is given to students in their sophomore year and the TEM 8 is given in their final year. Where I have found the going to be difficult is that the students and the administration don't care if you are teaching your students the skills they will need to communicate in English, so long as the students can score highly on the TEM exams. This is like teaching doctors how to pass the MCAT without teaching them anatomy. Although the government (both local and national) are trying to change this and shift the focus of the officials and the average people away from "teaching for tests," there seems to be a cultural reluctance to change this focus.

Standardized testing is not a recent phenomenon in China. Rather it has its roots in the imperial exam system in which young men would have to score highly on these government tests if they wanted to attain a high ranking job with in the government. The higher the score, the better the job and the more prestige an individual could hope to gain. If a person failed or did poorly on an exam, they lost face and would run the risk of shaming not only themselves, but all their relatives. This is something that many westerners have a hard time coming to terms with as most western cultures view the individual as a separate entity. In other words, we see the successes or failures of an individual as their and theirs alone, not as a reflection of the entire familial line. This cultural dependence on exam results seems to have carried forward through today's TEM and other similar exams. However, there are some problems with this. The first is that students know that no matter how poorly they do in a particular class, so long as they can pass the exams, they are pretty much guaranteed to graduate and find a decent job. It takes away from the authority of the teacher (at least at the university level).

This is not to say that I am completely against standardized exams. On the contrary, I think they serve a purpose but that purpose should be secondary to classroom academics. This would ensure not only that students would learn the necessary skills to succeed in their chosen field, but it would still leave room for standardized exams. Standardized exams should be used as "benchmarks" or tools by which we might judge a particular student's strengths or weaknesses. Once those strengths or weaknesses are known, then the student should be given the opportunity to receive more focused training or tutoring to strengthen weak areas. The standardized test should not be where the buck stops, but rather where it begins.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? I'd love to hear them.