Over the Wall of Silence

22 Over the Wall of Silence

accurate to call this a formalized reward system than a test, but remember, the terminology itself carries a lot of weight. Mention the word test in class and watch your students’ ears prick up. It’s important to note the psychology at work behind this. You are testing your students, but the stamp that some of them receive is not actually a grade per se , it simply represents bonus points. Are bonus points that important to students? In most cases, not really. But they play an important role in the process of motivating and guiding the class, in two key ways. First, they officialize the act of testing, and so bring about the “liberating” effect we described ear lier. Secondly, they are a way of compensating students for putting them on the spot. It’s a way of saying, “Sorry pal, I’m putting you under a bit of pressure, so here’s a little something for you...” More carrot, less stick. T YPE 2: R EAL - TIME CONVERSATIONS AWAY FROM THE GROUP Instant testing is a wonderfully effective way to keep motivation high at intervals throughout the class, but these are not the end goals of our teaching. In conversation classes, we also want our students to practice having conversations made up of a series of these back and-forth interactions. In order to help them focus on practicing for that specific task, we want to test them… on, well, that specific task. Longer interactions between teacher and student are not really possible in front of the class; you can’t have a real-time conversation for a few minutes with one or two students while the whole group is watching. Having an unscripted conversation in a foreign language is not easy for students to begin with, but it’s even harder when everyone is gawking at them. So, it’s obviously far better to do that