Orals may be dropped from language GCSEs. Good.

February 18th, 2008 - 00:13 | 2 comments

The government is considering dropping oral tests from language GCSEs as they are ‘too stressful’, according to the BBC. The idea has been slammed by Ex-Ofsted-chief Chris Woodhead, but then Chris Woodhead’s disdain is traditionally a litmus test for good ideas, so that counts as a plus.

Is it a good idea? I don’t know enough about child psychology and the goals of the education system to make an informed decision, but I will say this: my German GCSE oral was by far the most terrifying experience in my school career. I was in the top set for German, with a great, non-scary teacher who prepared us for literally months before the exam, and I worked hard to get ready, yet I still remember the abject terror of waiting for that half-hour session. It’s on a par with my driving test as the most nervous I’ve been, and its memory affected my A-level exam: I wasn’t going to put myself through all that again, and I forced myself not to care. It was one of the few times I ever completely flunked an exam¹.

For this reason I certainly don’t think the idea is ’stupid’, as Chris Woodhead says. Other reactions on the page include ‘life is stressful’, which is pathetic: in my experience life is very rarely that stressful, and when it is we hate it. Or someone else claims the point of learning a language is to speak it, so what use is a GCSE without a spoken test? In reply I’d question whether such a stressful situation can possibly give an accurate account of a student’s ability - wouldn’t it be testing their ability to deal with (unrealistic) pressure as much as their language skills? Plus, they only want to scrap the exam itself - teachers would still assess oral language skills in other ways. The reactions overall suggest a fair amount of ‘I went through it, why shouldn’t they?’, which I despise.

The report suggests that teacher assessments could adequately replace the oral exam. Sounds reasonable to me. The more I think about it, the more I’m in favour.

past tense as there are no exams in my degree - ra! [↩]

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2 Responses to “Orals may be dropped from language GCSEs. Good.”

1 elspeth Nov 23rd, 2008 at 3:17 pm

Hi,
It may seen rather bizarre to drop the oral content from a language examination and I can understand those who are outraged by its proposed omission. However, having three children who have gone through the german ‘oral’ experience I have to agree - to a certain extent. My three sons, and I cannot understand the reason for this, have absolutely no aptitude for languages, They are lovers of science and maths and excel in different ways in those subjects. They all absolutely hated german. One son in particular became very anxious about his german lessons. At the time of the german orals nearly every spare minute was spent preparing for the orals - at the expense of all other subjects. It was a very time consuming and frustrating experience for them all (and still is for my son is Year 11). They will never make use of their german education and for them it was a complete waste of time. Some children, however, have an aptitude for languages and for them I think it is an important part of the examination process. When the government decided not to make languages compulsory after year 9 they were right to do so. Unfortunately, some schools chose to ignore this and forced every Year 10 student to do at least one language - which is where the problem is. Force schools to allow pupils not to study languages and you will be left with children who do have an aptitude for languages - and then orals can stay.
elspeth
2 Paul Nov 24th, 2008 at 10:22 am

The recent comment made me come back and think about this, I’m very much in favour of teacher assessment.

My own experience was that I didn’t stress about the exam, I had already resolved myself to doing no better in it than I was able and that trying overly hard to do well would result in my misremembering 300 phrases. My teacher was great and her ‘for goodness sake, say something more’ hand gestures resulted in me pulling some extra German phrases out of a vague and empty memory.

No doubt I said a dog would make a very comfortable hat until it barks, but given I fought all my instincts of English grammar (which for those who know me, wasn’t so hard) and reversed everything to be in line with those crazy Germans, I must have said some utter gibberish in a grammatically correct manner. That or my marks were confused with someone elses!

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