This week we
made Test of English for International Communication, more known
as TOIEC. I was a little afraid because I like to be evaluated but
I would like having a good grade. So I started looking for websites, texts that
could explain more how this evaluation will happen. I’ve found two I liked
more:
In first website I’ve found handbooks
which explained with all details how TOIEC is and how the abilities inherent in
the language learning process will be measured. Then I
was very apprehensive because I was thinking it could be so hard that I
couldn’t get success with a good grade.
It wasn’t just me was
apprehensive too – I thought it was. Before we started the TOIEC everybody was
talking about, asking how it would work, what subject we had study, if it was
specific… a lot of questions. It is a little funny because we are teachers, we
know how evaluate, every day we are making tests for our students, formulate
questions, elaborate situations for measuring our students’ knowledge but in
our time we were so afraid of it that we seemed teenagers. I think it happens
mainly because as we want our students obtain success, we want to prove with
ourselves efforts that they could be too. And what will be the best
way to show them this than being ourselves an example to inspire them?
We had an instructor from ETS,
the organization is responsible for creating the tests and score them. For my surprise this
test doesn’t exist only for English Language but for many other languages too.
And unexpectedly the instructor told us that this kind of evaluation was
requested first time for Chinese Government that would like know how much the
investment they made for a group of Chinese workers was being exploited. I
really thought it was an American invention…
We’ve passed
most part of our morning doing the text because there was a lot of details for
explaining, many rules to follow because they have a standard
that is observed in all world exactly for maintaining the effectiveness of
their measure.
Then we made the test and I
could smoothly say it was amazing. It so good when we are tested and we are
sure we are well evaluated. First because we could see that we aren’t being
tested with a silly test or, in other hand, with a so hard test we couldn’t do.
It made think that the evaluation we made for our students influences in their
motivation too, because if it is so hard they can’t do they will always having
the feeling that they never learn in the same way a very easy could make then lazy or
not evaluating them correctly.But anyway I enjoyed TOEIC and I hope the feeling of
success I had was consonant with the score will receive.
