«Decipimur specie recti» (Мы обманываемся видимостью правильного)
Об этом предупреждал Гораций)
«Detur digniori» (Пусть достанется более достойному)
«Debes, ergo potes» (Должен – значит можешь)
There are many different opinions on the meaning and context testing in educational process, having much in common because testing is necessary, obligatory, useful, productive, effective and often very interesting method of correcting and clearing up not only the foreign language level, but level of personality, open to know the true stage of preparing in the subject and readiness to prolonged improvement in studying as a whole. “Prolonged” denotes “consistently”. Firstly it has attention to testing as a process and a separate problem of measuring od reliability of gotten volume of knowledge.
In educational process the teachers deal with their students abilities’ definition, estimation, measuring, developing and adoption as suitable to be in the near future successfully introduced in the professional field process.
Testing is not only intellectual, but emotional and psychological training for those tested. It is identifying tool, so, it needs identifying approach to all positions , including types of tests , different kind of testing, their close and prolonged purposes (aims and goals in a sum), the number of tests due to their concrete task for precisely measuring the abilities of those we are interested in.
It is essential to define in the process of teachers’ planning the testing the concrete cases where the tests “are likely to influence teaching”.
The educational program is oriented to stocking the knowledge items on the line from the simplest to the most difficult and complicated, being in demand. So, it is very important to think over terminological raw in accordance with all concrete themes and chapters of the educational program.
The scientists all over the world did their best in order to create “a test of testing system” [1, p. 6]. It includes a lot of items and moments of testing activity the teachers have been used not only in daily teaching routine practice, but in the course of pedagogical experiments under the headline “Testing”.
Before describing in details the different purposes of testing at the different stages of studying the different aspects of the discipline “foreign language” let us pay attention to the so called “in a special way organized ecologically from the position of psychology, calmness and understanding sphere of testing: place, time, group.” [2, p. 171]. One of our tasks as those testing those tested, is to define their stability of “Being Oneself” in any situation of control being close to risk-zone. In order to make the asking process comfortable and productive, some moments are to be taken into account while organizing the very calm space, where the role of all involved is equal for strong students and weak students. In this situation a teacher acts as the wise leader. His/her mission is to create a climate of success as possible and approved for everyone. At the same time, when testing is a kind of risk and stress, failure considers to be possible in order to break competition and jealousy. Everybody, strong or weak at the moment of testing is worth of being respected, because testing is one of the educational process’ actions, nor the educational personal result as a whole. So, there is always chances, possibilities and opportunities to improve the result, even not very good at the beginning. A special note deserves behavior. The wise leader-teacher pays respectful attention to all behavior. The teacher, having fluently looked the first answers, discovering mistakes and errors, let the students to understand that “knowing certain facts is not more powerful than simple wisdom” [3, p. 5]. From the position of educational process and educational sphere “wisdom” for a student is a wide range of his intellectual and personal possibilities, opportunities and skills, at every moment open to realization through successful studying in spite of the difficulties on the way to education.
The students learn that effective action arises out of readiness to overcome obstacles and optimizing the ways of communication with teachers and classmates in order to raise their students’ professional competence in a clear sense of productive being in learning action. The students learn that testing is an effective action, arising out of industrious intentions, systematic studies and recognition of responsibility of everyone in reaching educational goals, closely connected nowadays with possession a number of competencies as a foundation of a professional stability. So, the group testing work is grounded in obvious and natural righteousness with explained and adopted rules and regulations for an effective groups’ including into the process of control.
The source of the teachers ‘ability influences directly the students’ ability to be successful in testing. At every moment of his/her professional activity, a teacher is leading a group, being aware of what is happening and how estimating things happen. Due to this approach to the process a teacher can steer clear of trouble (satisfactory or bad marks of the students), and be both vital and effective. Even when a teacher does not write or answer a test on his/her own, he has to act accordingly. What does it mean? It means, that for the students’ testing as a process and means- denotes universality, telling all about their professionalism and personal value for their teacher, who is for them a source of power, endurance and excellence. That is why, consciousness or awareness, as the source of teacher’s ability, support the students, being testing, while learning them to become increasingly conscious and successful.
Let us come back to the purposes of testing, being recognized as obligatory at all stages of learning foreign language. The stages of the process may be described in a such consequence:
– to diagnose students’ weaknesses and strengths. It is necessary to identify what they do not know and what they know;
– to identify the stage of a teaching program, some parts of it due to the abilities of the students as most appropriate to;
– to assist placement of students of different level of preparation by preliminary individual personal testing them before a general testing of a whole group;
– to define the objectives of a course of study and declare it before forming the content of the testing materials’
– to discover how far students have achieved the objectives of a course of study;
– to define the frame of the language proficiency for the students of different level of preparation;
– to measure language proficiency regardless of any language courses that students, and then- specialists- may have followed;
– to create a system of estimation the results of testing with valuable advice to improve the results if necessary and detailed description of the way of achieving the high results in the course of the following testing.
This is a short structure of objective and subjective testing, showed good results in the course of pedagogical experiments with the students of different years of studying. The final stage included two kinds of tests - final achievement tests and progress achievement tests. The both types appeared to be very effective in the process of post-graduate teaching and professional training of specialists of the wide profile, being in great demand of a modern society. In reality. Testing is a noble labor, preparing winners. “Jucundi acti Labores sunt” (Труд завершенный приятен). “Industriae nil impossibile est” (Для прилежного нет невозможного).
