Teach English in Guoji Zhen - Yangzhou Shi

Along the 20th century schools and educational centers followed rigid and conservative forms of evaluation and testing for the students, inherited from the religious methods. Test day was always a terrible and traumatic way to see if the students had studied and understood the lesson and the subject. Like a doctrine, history, mathematics, science and linguistic just dropped a lot of knowledge to the learners read and memorize. It worked for a long time, especially in a system where the school was not a place for forming humans, but to mold professionals to labor market, to assume positions and work for the rest of their lives on these issues, even in school or universities, the evaluation methods were always the same. However, with the invention of the World Wide Web at the beginning of 21st century, longer distances got closer to a measure of a click, when the internet started to create a whole new environment in the business sector, looking for new professionals and new knowledge that did not exist before. Together with that, education had to adapt itself for these new needs and the new scenario, the society ordered new brains that the traditional style was not filling. At the educational base, the way of looking to the learners changed and a main question urged: how to evaluate students? Experts in education created new forms to conduct the evaluation of knowledge, taking the test day off and changing the memorizing texts and information to a more dynamic way, analyzing students competence in different situations, using not only a unique test, but specially continued evaluation. Daily, weekly or monthly the teacher put a system of improvement, to verify how the subject was being understandable and when it would be necessary to do an intervention, to change the method of teaching or to guide the student to a new study direction. The first problem about the current evaluation system revolves around the use of knowledge. The books and syllabus used by the regular educational centers do not focus on the daily life acquirements activities, but in a very controlled and simplistic form, especially when they create the test. Not taking specifically English or any other language subjects. It is known that history do not walk alone in human lives, it is directly related to geography, math and all kinds of studies, hence the main focus of the evaluation methods should be on encouraging students to use and to understand that school different classes have transverse aspects. This brings us to the next problem, taking specifically the use of English language. It is clear that in the beginning and along the first elicitations of the language, the teaching material is vital to the students familiarize with vocabulary or grammar, but without real life situations, all this knowledge is useless. It is important that the teacher sees and feels how the students are continually growing, studying and understanding the classes and if they can notice how English walks along with daily life. Unfortunately, at this point we may have a great shock of generations: whereas old teachers still focus their students to the test day, new educational specialists indicate that evaluation must be prioritized in a continued way. Still being the ESA method a strong methodology when the students have time to study and practice together with the teacher, on the continued evaluation students should prolong these practices for more than just one lesson or a twenty minutes activities: pairs or group work have to extend for homework, where they do a research and have time to a better preparation for a more serious presentation. Time and space are essential to the success of activities, pulling them to keep the “English thinking” out of the class, on their regular life and putting a clearly and standard criteria. After this time, the students would do a presentation for the whole class. Roleplays, games, songs, presentations about historical figures, events or even creating an on-line blog or video in a social media platform as tweeter, YouTube or BlogSpot will push the students out of another standards school tests problem: the paper. Backing to the start of the essay, the globalized world is searching for people with knowledge the go further than the paper and pen, furthermore, the use of the social medias and technologies push the students to the class, especially the younger ones. This second problem about traditional formal tests is to ask for students lay their best skills on the paper while we are living in a cloud digital society where: less paper is better. Fast quizzes, videos interpretations or song analysis are a good way to the teacher balance the pace of the students. It is understandable that some schools or institutes in a poor or without structure location don’t have all the apparatus to allow these innovations, but teachers can have their own notebooks, cellphones and with the new technologies and cheaper products, even their own projectors! All things considered, although the evaluation and tests are an essential part of the studying and graduation process, our society is changing, in organization and needs, so the education and the educational structure shall change together to prepare the people to live and understand these new realities. Adapt the traditional way of thinking have to be a must in the teacher’s life, to suitable the methodology to the new generation and not look to the evaluation process as a final point on the lesson path, but a point to guide the daily work, pulling the classes to a nowadays context and show to learners what will be expect of them in a near future.