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he is capable of learning. After he has done this lesson, which is
called a "Prova", the school tries to find him a suitable course.
During the Prova the teacher should do nothing but the question-
answer work for the whole lesson; he should give the student no
Dictations or Readings, as they will slow the student down and not
give the school an accurate enough idea of his capabilities.
Before beginning a Prova, the teacher should ask the student if he
has studied English before, and, if so, where, and for how many
years. He should also ask the student what mark he got at the end of
each year at school, whether he has been to England or America etc.,
or has had any direct contact with English-speaking people. When
the teacher knows all this, he will know how to give the lesson.
If the student has studied 4 or 5 years at school, but says he has
forgotten it all, the teacher will find that most of the words in the
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first half of the first book will rapidly return to the student's memory
- words like "pen, pencil, come, go" etc. He should be able to move
this kind of student quite fast, as there should be little or no
explaining to be done. If the student has studied quite well at
school, or has been to England for several months, then the teacher
need explain nothing, but can go straight into the questions, and
perhaps only ask the 'plus' question for each word. If, on the other
hand, the student is extremely good, the teacher can miss out one or
two easy words and concentrate on the difficult ones only. This,
however, is not usually a good policy, and should only be used if a
good student has to catch up a course. Generally, it is better to rush
quickly through all the words.
Collective Provas
Ideally, each student should be given a Prova by himself, to assess
his knowledge and gauge his individual speed of learning.
Sometimes, however, this is not possible. A school might, for
example, have 50 students all starting on the same day. When this
happens the students should be given a form to fill in with their
names, whether they have studied English before, and to what level,
etc. On the form there should be 6 questions (one from each of the
exams of the first 6 Stages of the Method), which the student should
be asked to translate as best he can.
From the results the school can divide the students into 5 groups of
10. The bottom group would consist of students who knew no
English, whilst the top group would consist of students who
translated the questions reasonably well.
The teachers would then give each group a Prova. The groups
would all begin on Page One, Book One of the Method, and the
teachers would sort out the fast and slow students. It might, for
example, be found that a student who has never studied before is
very quick to learn, and so can be moved to a higher group, whilst a
student who has studied English before and made a reasonable
translation of the questions, is very slow in speaking and
understanding, and so has to be down-graded.
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To help grade the students further, the teachers can give them a two-
line dictation halfway through the Prova to see if they can reproduce
correctly what they have heard. For this purpose any two lines from
the first 6 exam dictations can be used. No dictation can, of course,
be given to the students that know no English, whilst the first two
lines can be given to those who translated the questions on the form
reasonably well; the second two lines can be given to those who
seemed quite competent; whilst the last two lines can test those
students who seemed as though they might be at the level of the
Cambridge Preliminary.
The questions
1) Are you going to the door?
2) Do we call the thing we wear on our heads a hat?
3) Must we study a lot if we want to learn a language well?
4) Is your pen worth as much now as when you bought it?
5) Will there be even more people in the world in ten years'
time than there are today?
6) If you fell from the second floor of a building, would you
hurt yourself?
The dictations
1) What is this? It is a light. The table is not short, but it is
long. A village is small.
2) There are about thirty pages in that book. He does not go
home after the lesson.
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3) We eat our lunch with a knife and fork. On the table we
can have wine.
4) This is the worst ball-game I've ever played, but
yesterday's was the best.
5) He was driving the car at a devil of a speed round a blind
corner.
6) There was a piece of wire tied round the brick, which cut
his skin.
The ten-minute Prova
If a school continually has several students coming for information
each day and has to make the students wait a few days to be given a
Prova, or finds it cannot afford to give each student a whole lesson
of Prova, it can reduce the teacher's Prova time to ten minutes, so
that he can give four Provas in one hour.
Most of this type of Prova can be done by the student himself and
marked by the school's receptionist. The school would make a tape
recording of the Dictation and have copies of the written test
printed.
How to give the ten-minute Prova
The first step is for the student to do the Dictation from the tape. He
then answers the "Yes-No" questions and translates the vocabulary
that are on the Prova Paper (shown later). All this he can do
himself. The receptionist then marks his work. The teacher looks at
the marks to get an idea of the student's knowledge of English, and
takes the student into a classroom for a ten-minute Oral Test. First
he gets the student to read the hundred-word Reading Passage and
deducts a mark for each word pronounced incorrectly. This should
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take about 2 minutes. The remaining 8 minutes are spent on the
Question-Answer work with the teacher correcting the student's
pronun-ciation, as in a normal lesson.
It does not matter if the teacher does not get through all the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]