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How Tests Make Us Smarter | ||
Tags: Placement Test | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 11 23 July 2014 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/how-tests-m ake-us-smarter.html
The article is worth reading. Here is a snippet: [quote]When students are tested, they are required to retrieve knowledge from memory. Much educational activity, such as lectures and textbook readings, is aimed at helping students acquire and store knowledge. Various kinds of testing, though, when used appropriately, encourage students to practice the valuable skill of retrieving and using knowledge. The fact of improved retention after a quiz — called the testing effect or the retrieval practice effect — makes the learning stronger and embeds it more securely in memory. This is vital, because many studies reveal that much of what we learn is quickly forgotten. Thus a central challenge to learning is finding a way to stem forgetting. [/url] I think about how to or how I do incorporate testing in my own studies. FSI drills quickly came to mind. They are low stakes and they encourage you to produce the proper response to a particular verbal stimuli. Obviously, this is only part of language learning, but it is an important one, especially if one wants to speak spontaneously with grammatical correctness. Shadowing encourages me to pay attention to the audio and try to keep up. No one is listening, so it is low stakes. Assimil look away and repeat is mentioned in some course instructions for the passive wave. I.E., look away from the book and repeat each line from dialogue. You're not trying to memorize the line. You're trying to think about what the line means while you reproduce it without the help of the text or audio. Again, low stakes testing. Listening to the news or a podcast or a book. You're trying to understand. It's a low stakes test. There are plenty of other low stakes ways to test yourself. What do you do? Edited by luke on 23 July 2014 at 8:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5599 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 2 of 11 24 July 2014 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Your view which activities encompasses testing is very broad indeed. Every use of our language (reading, writing, speaking, listening) would be testing, because we retrieve information from our memory (or fail).
I could say, I did a driving test when returning by bicycle from work, did a cooking test when preparing my meal and a health and exercising test when going for a walk in the woods ;-) While studying and using languages, I get enough feedback that I do not need "proper" tests, which are often not too useful. I give private lessons for school and the time we prepare exclusively for exams by drilling structures which he will have forgotten again two weeks later could be more efficiently used with a broader scope in mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4736 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 11 24 July 2014 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Talk to human beings? This is pretty low stakes, unless it's my boss and I'm
explaining why I'm looking at HTLAL at work. I'll also do a quick review of recently studied points while walking around or doing anything that only requires partial concentration. This isn't formalized at all, but I suspect it's essential for how I learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3886 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 24 July 2014 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
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The article, at least from my language learning perspective, could just as well be called, "How Tests Make Us Saner", because I don't know how I could measure my progress without daily self-testing since I don't have the benefit of a native speaker available to give me input.
The type of test for me is secondary to the circumstances in which the test is given. I try to be as unprepared as possible, at least have a 9-hour dormant period where I don't speak or hear Mandarin, and then I try to test my skill level. It's the equivalent of a teacher unexpectedly announcing a test, and the students don't even have a chance to look at their notes. Maybe it's better to be a little flustered prior to self-testing your listening and speaking ability because it's more real. One linguist who was studying Hungarian on his own tested his fluency by speaking as long as he could in Hungarian on a complicated subject without consulting a dictionary before or during the exercise. Internet radio is the best testing tool for me because I can focus more on listening and speaking, and I don't have to deal with the ever present Mandarin subtitles on TV. I have found that forcing myself to listen to 3 hours of Mandarin radio daily, which does't always seem like a low stakes test, has increased my comprehension level more than TV has. So listening to the variety of radio formats, and the Mainland and Taiwan dialects, is a test in itself. Hopefully it is paying off because I watched a Mainland news show a couple weeks ago which I am normally too scared or too busy to watch, and this time I actually understood 99%. But that is not typical and furthermore the newsreaders speak too clearly for real life. It's too sterile for me. But I have done all the tests mentioned above and then some. The ultimate test for me is a man and woman Mandarin radio comedy team I hear on weekdays. I often fail at that, but sometimes I can more or less understand their jokes and I even laugh out loud. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 11 24 July 2014 at 10:40am | IP Logged | ||
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This thread reminds me of another thread, namely the one about "Benefits of failing to learn a language", where s_allard had found an article from NY Times about a man who had failed to learned French, but found that
"my failed French quest yielded an unexpected benefit. After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth." If a test forces you to draw on stocked knowledge or perform complicated tasks then it counts as training, and if obtaining high scores in some test is so important to you concentrate more or maybe even prepare for the grand event then it counts as hard training, and then it may have the general effect described by the failed language learner above (who by the way used Rosetta Stone - maybe that's part of the reason that his attempt failed). But the same effect can be obtained without the ominous element of control by an outside force. In SRS systems you are controlled by a machine (although the test data probably have been ´fed to the machine by yourself): you are presented with a series of challenges, and you only get semantic information if you fail to know the correct answers. That's one of my reasons for preferring wordlists: I get the information first, try to memorize it and afterwards there is a control that I succeeded in doing so. The repetition rounds are more control-like, but they come relatively soon after the original access to lexical information. If I want to be tested without having seen the relevant information first I can just open a book or watch TV. If I understand the content I have passed the test. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5236 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 6 of 11 24 July 2014 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
Which stations? How did you find them? :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4444 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 7 of 11 24 July 2014 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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When it comes to language learning, you can have tests specific to course materials. Take French for
instance, in our primary school class, most people tend to do well with subject-verb conjugations with a bit of vocabulary on the side such as numbers, days of the week. There is a lot of repetition of the very basic material. But if we go to Paris, how many of the students can ask for directions? Bus routes? Order from restaurants? If you come from Asia in places like China, Japan and Korea, you are tested constantly from the time you enter kindergarten to your last day in university. You go to school during the day. And after school, you would attend tutoring sessions to make sure you are up to par with your schoolwork. In China, high school students in their final year would prepare for the Gaokao 高考. The ones with the top marks are guaranteed spots in the best universities. What tests do is to create pressure / incentive for people to study. Otherwise, people have a tendency to be more relaxed after taking classes. You become smarter because you are constantly pushing your brain to work harder. Besides tests, having regular assignments that will be graded is also important. Take students in primary school for instance: during their summer holidays they can go on vacation and relax or go for summer school, tutoring or have a workbook to complete for the start of the following school year. Besides going to classes and taking tests, a lot of our learning is outside the classroom. Somebody who is preparing for a 20 km marathon doesn't go to class. He does his stretching exercises and run a certain distance each day. Somebody who is learning to play a song on a piano for a performance would practice everyday until the event comes. People who are successful learning languages would be reading and listening to audio materials in the language constantly. Before we get into the discussion whether or not taking tests will make us smarter, we have to tackle the more fundamental question how we define human intelligence. Came across a YouTube video: Controversy of Intelligence: Crash Course Psychology #23 Edited by shk00design on 24 July 2014 at 4:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 11 25 July 2014 at 1:10am | IP Logged | ||
If those things are a bit of a stretch for you, then they are tests. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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