Test Control in the Process of Teaching a Foreign Language

TEST CONTROL IN THE PROCESS OF TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Testing and evaluating knowledge and skills is an important part of the learning process. The success of the whole learning process depends on its correct formulation. Mastering the method of testing knowledge and grading is one of the most important and most difficult tasks facing the teacher.

Control allows improving the learning process, replacing ineffective methods and ways of teaching with more effective ones, creating more favorable conditions for correcting and improving practical language skills. As a result of monitoring, the teacher receives information about the results of the work of the group as a whole and each student individually. According to the results of the control, the teacher can reveal difficulties in the pupils mastering certain language phenomena, gaps in knowledge. These data can serve as a basis for individualization and differentiation of training. Control is necessary both for the teacher and for the students. It allows each student to understand how much progress he has achieved in learning a foreign language, what are his shortcomings, and helps to coordinate independent work. Objective evaluations provide students with a certain incentive for further work.

At present, it is precisely the test control that makes it possible to reduce the time between conducting the control and reporting the results to a minimum.

A test is understood to be assignments that have a specific organization that allows all students to work simultaneously under the same conditions and record the execution with symbols. Test assignments always have an unambiguous solution, the determination of the correctness of the answer is carried out on the prepared key.

Tests can determine the level of learning, the student's language competence relative to the level of other students or to a certain criterion. Thus, the test results can be used to assess the level of student learning, to select them to a particular institution, to certify their achievements in a particular activity, to be distributed into groups of studies depending on the level achieved. for the diagnosis of learning difficulties. Also, tests can measure general skills in speech activity or the achievement of a certain level of skills in the process of mastering a particular topic, a specific course of study.

Proponents of testing in foreign language teaching distinguish a number of advantages of this type of control compared to others: the simplicity of the procedure to perform; significant time savings (at the same time a large number of respondents are being tested, testing can simultaneously include tasks for several sections or for all course topics); speed of obtaining results, ease of quantitative expression of the quality of task performance; eliminates the element of subjectivity on the part of the teacher in the evaluation (especially when conducting computer testing); all testers are in equal conditions, both in the monitoring process and in the assessment process (the assessment procedure is the same for all students regardless of place of residence, type and type of educational institution in which students are engaged, etc. ).

At the same time, a number of shortcomings of traditional methods of control in the classroom in a foreign language are emphasized. For example, written test papers and an individual oral survey are time consuming; in a frontal survey, you can let go of the students who use