Competency Testing is when an evaluation moves past the typical exam format we’ve known for years: fill in the blanks, multiple choice, short written answers – to sometimes longer essay style responses – but all on paper. When I was in school and studying French, I remember having a few oral evaluations. Those where the killers. The ones I remember most were presenting a few things before the entire class – of course using the language we had been working on in prior sessions. The other: one-on-one interviews with the teacher, where she would ask some questions about material we’ve studied.

While competency based evaluations are stressful for the student, I think they are incredibly more accurate means of assessing language progress. You can hack a written exam. (I remember taking sentence structures from the questions my teachers wrote, and using them to shape my answer.) But live presentations are quite difficult to wing – especially if you have a light Q and A session after (again in the target language.)

Over at the It’s A Hardknock Teacher’s Life blog, there’s a great post that got me thinking about how and how not to create competency based assessments. Missprofe argues that if care is not taken, the assessment can be disconnected from authentic language production – something we should avoid at all costs.

“I, too, want to assess what my students know and are able to do with the language, but I want to do so in a way which produces natural language.  For me, reciting letters and identifying numbers out of order isn’t communication. Conversely, spelling one’s name and reciting important telephone numbers is, for they are tasks that students may actually need to perform.”(Competency Testing? Missprofe)

I think this is more of a design issue. It’s not that competency based evaluation is off – it’s how it was deployed in the classroom. A rethink at teacher level is necessary. At the beginner stage of language acquisition, being able to recite letters and numbers are important skills that must be demonstrated, and would therefore belong inside your competency evaluation. (Your students must be able to produce this target language in order to advance.)

The question now is: how do I design an evaluation that would mimic a real life situation? Attaching classroom activity to reality is terribly important.  Students have to see and feel that “What I’m doing in class will actually help me when the class is over.”  This is especially true of adult learners – the more ESL teachers can link classroom work to student reality, the stronger the motivation to learn will be.

Maybe an effective competency evaluation would be having students exchange cell phone numbers, or email addresses to each other.

The link between classroom activity and outside life is vital for students to remain fluent with their L2 after instruction stops. Most students – and I include myself – don’t remember their French or Spanish after school not because of faulty teaching, but because there’s no ongoing need to produce the L2 in their day-to-day reality.

Perhaps we should also teach effective habits of L2 learners. Not only focus on what students need to do or produce to move on to the next level, but also demonstrate how they can keep their L2 alive and growing AFTER language instruction is over – WITHOUT a teacher present. After all, if you stop using an L2, you’ll eventually forget it.