Vocabulary question: do you know what this is?
Nope, me neither. And no-one’s ever suggested my English was not up-to-scratch as a result.
Actually, I now know what it is – it’s a capstan, ‘a thick cylinder that winds up a rope, used for lifting heavy objects such as an anchor on a ship’ (OALD). I think it’s a fairly safe bet that my landlocked sixteen year-old students neither know nor need to know this rather obscure word.
Earlier this week, a couple of my brightest students took part in a national English competition for 9th and 10th graders. When I saw them the next day and asked them how it had gone, their faces actually looked pained. “It was terrible,” they said. I suspected they were probably just being dramatic.
As soon as I saw the test papers I changed my mind. One of the tasks was a C-test, which is a kind of cloze text in which some of the words are partially gapped. There’s nothing wrong with that per se – C-tests are a fairly reliable indicator of overall language proficiency and can be fun to tackle – especially if the text is an interesting one.
This is an excerpt from the actual C-test my students had to do. Here’s my first question: how well would you have done?
Three further questions for you to consider:
1.) Is a task like this more likely to motivate or demotivate students?
2.) How reasonable do you think it is to expect non—native 9th and 10th graders to be able to understand words like tarpaulin, capstan and Seaward ho! ?
3.) How likely do you think it is that my students will ever want to read Stevenson’s Treasure Island after completing a task like this?
Actually, those are rhetorical questions. The answers, I believe, are self-evident and pose serious questions about the validity of competitions which lower the self-esteem of even the most gifted students while draining them of any motivation to take part in any subsequent competitions.
Just out of interest, in my next lesson with the group, I wrote the phrase “tarpaulins tramping round the capstan” on the board and invited the students to draw what they though the phrase suggested. Here are some of their efforts.
Tarpaulins tramping round the capstan?
Seaward ho!