Chapter 6 "Crafting Understanding"

Am I Teaching or Training?

I work in a private catholic school called "San Ignacio de Loyola Alonso de Ovalle". The programme of English as a Foreign Language is presented to students in a way that they can learn skills to communicate in another language (English). The complete syllabus and lesson-plans are structured and designed to fulfill the communicative goals such as: Oral and Written production, as well as Reading and Listening comprehension. To reach these goals, the school provides teachers of 5 hours (45 minutes each) from pre-school to 10th grade, and only 2 hours a week for 11th and 12th grades. In addition, the use of Materials such as: the students’ book, the workbook, and the extra audio-visual material such as listening and videos, is compulsory for students and teachers of this matter. The problem is that all the assessments, except for 1 each semester, are focused on grammar, reading and listening comprehension, and there is almost no written or oral production as the assessments or tests are “Objective Questions” only. Students are just learning to fill in the blanks so my question is: Am I Teaching English as a Foreign Language or just Training students to answer certain types of Tests?
This year, The SIMCE has included and covered the subject English as a Foreign Language and has been taken to all students of 11th grade. The news was confirmed at the beginning of the second term, so schools and teachers of English had little time to prepare their students for this test, which is an international certification test called "TOEIC-BRIDGE" that covers "Reading Comprehension" and "Listening Comprehension". My students feel that the test, which was taken last October 26th, was not very difficult, as it just included “simple forms” and did not include the most difficult grammar tense for them “Present or Past Perfect”. In addition, the types of questions were very similar to what they have always answered so it is probable that the school get good SIMCE results in English.
My students tend to say that they just do not know how to communicate in English, but on the other hand, it is not difficult for them the comprehension of it. I agree. Just few of them can use the language for communicational purposes, and the rest just possess a great amount of vocabulary and grammar rules.
The idea of this post is not to show off nor to criticize the English programmes, but to re-consider the idea of communicational purposes for English at schools and in the National Curriculum and claim straight-forward that we have been preparing students for tests like this one, and others that will certainly come in the future like P.S.U. If school departments focus on the true idea of Training instead of Teaching, More schools will be prepared to face tests like the SIMCE and more students will also be prepared and confident to take them as the curriculums, syllabus and lesson plans will be designed to reach goals like this, and not other ones.
Why are all these statements important? Real understanding is based on truth and not ideas. Students may not have the same instruction as we teachers have, but they certainly are able to understand and to identify things when are not coherent. More than that, they are always interested in specific points that would be considered in the different evaluations, so they are prepared to criticize when the type of evaluations are not in the same line than goals or objectives. And as far as I know, “Understanding for Communication” has been the most important goal ever since I began to work as a teacher.