I share a Tourism English class with another foreign teacher whom works at my school (Alec). This week I gave the class a simple oral exam in which the students had to describe their weekend plans. I informed the class that if they have trouble, they would still get credit if they kept their answers short, they only needed to be prepared to answer the question "What will you do over the weekend?". To my dismay, many of the students had trouble answering the question, although we reviewed similar questions the past 3 weeks (for the quiz). When I informed Alec about the quiz results, he was surprised. Alec teaches a much more difficult book and from what he has observed, most, if not all the of students should have easily answered that question. We discussed the issue with the class captain, as to get her view on the problem. She informed Alec that he may be misjudging the skill level of the students, but none of us were certain.
This is quite a frustrating problem to figure out. Are the students truly unable to give an adequate reply to such a simple question, due to the stress of taking a quiz? This would explain why Alec has assumed that these students have a higher skill set then what they displayed in my class. We were unable to come to any conclusions, but Alec and I plan on investigating this issue during the coming weeks. If we can solve this riddle, then hopefully I can discover better methods that I can use to serve the needs of the class
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