The blog post added on September 12th was concerning #ELTchat. This is a blog spot which is a branch off from #edchat that is specifically for ELT professionals. I commented on how great I thought the concept behind the original #edchat was. It is a great place for educational professionals to get together from all over and collaborate or debate on topics relevant to their field. I went on to say that I thought it was great to see people creating more specific chat rooms for specific areas of study. That way those concerned with the same problems can have a place to find each other.
The blog post of August 8th was titled "Maintaining oral standards." The basic concept was that while oral examinations are a great way to evaluate the skills of the student the evaluation process needs to be tweaked to provide the best evaluations. The post goes on to list things that can significantly improve the evaluation process. One thing that will improve the accuracy of evaluations would be having evaluators that are neither the student's English teacher or class teacher. The idea is that the evaluators must be impartial while evaluating the student. The student's instructors would be biased and would evaluated the students differently based on their student-teacher relationship and their understanding of the student's capabilities. I agreed that we need evaluations based on where the student is at the time of the evaluation as opposed to how far the student has come. The post also suggested creating a standard of evaluation due the the simple fact that the student will get different evaluation from different evaluators. If one consistently evaluates tougher than another, those being evaluated by these two separately are not getting true evaluations. I commented on my agreement on the fact that we need a way to insure that all of the students are evaluated the same and held to the same standard. Also, the idea of having oral partners may look good on paper, but at times may not yield the results that some might consider the only outcome. The problem is that this would press the students to introduce teamwork into an examination that is already difficult. Culturally the two may clash. Therefore, the basics of the oral examination will become far more difficult than originally anticipated.
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