Category: Testing

Mid-term Speaking Exams at BEA

4/12/2014

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

The BEA kids are almost finished with their mid-term speaking exams. Along with vocabulary, grammar and paragraph writing tests, the students also have to complete a 10-minute speaking test with their teacher. For example, the Basic course students have to give a self-introduction and the Pre-intermediate students have to participate in a restaurant role play as a server and as a customer. It gets a little tougher for the Intermediate and Advanced classes, who have to ask a series of favors and give their opinion on a social issue respectively. In this way, we can make sure our students speaking and listening skills are improving in a balanced manner with their reading and writing skills.

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Last-minute Mid-term Exam Study Groups

4/12/2014

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It's mid-term exam week at BEA! The BEA kids are hard at work getting in some last-minute study time before their vocabulary, grammar, paragraph writing and speaking exams. Once exams are over, they'll be a little less stressed to enjoy all of our holiday festivities leading up to our Christmas party.

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Mid-Term Exam Week at BEA

3/12/2014

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Despite the kick-off of our Christmas festivities, the BEA kids and teachers are still hard at work with mid-term exams this week! Our language tests are all-encompassing that includes both writing and speaking exams. Over the course of three days, the students take vocabulary, grammar and paragraph writing exams. During this time, students are also called out one-by-one to also take a speaking exam with their teacher. In this way, we can make sure that our students are developing all the skills they need to communicate so that they can have the spoken and written skills needed to work in the tourist sector.

One of the most important reasons for these test is to also teach honesty to our students. Due to corruption in the public school system, many students have to cheat in order to pass their exams. Teachers often expect students to pay them bribes, and without these bribes, students will usually fail. However, at BEA, such circumstances don't exist and students only need to give us their hard work to pass their courses. Since the BEA teachers cover everything in their lessons, there is no reason for students to cheat. For all of our students, it's the first time for them to learn about academic "honor policies."

In the past, I’ve always been in Japan teaching my own university courses, but I finally got the chance to observe how the tests I prepare are put into practice. After grading the basic and intermediate course vocabulary tests yesterday, I noticed that the basic students definitely need more help with spelling, and the that intermediate learners need more time on idioms.

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TOEIC Testing

1/8/2014

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As part of BEA's language assessment, our Advanced and Intermediate English Language Course students take the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) at the end of each school year. The purpose of this test is to assess daily communication skills for using English in the workplace, which helps our students know if they're ready for a job in Siem Reap's tourist industry. The two-hour multiple-choice test consists of 200 questions that is divided into listening and reading comprehension. Also, the students' scores tell us where they rank among other students in other Southeast Asian countries. From last year's scores, the BEA kids were slightly above the average score for the entire Asian region. We're hoping that once we've totaled the results, the students did just as well, if not better, than last year!

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Mid-term Tests and Writing Exchange Project

11/12/2011

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Hi everyone,

It's been a while since our last updates from BEA. We don't mean to ignore you, but it's that time of year when all the marking starts to pile up, and everything else goes to the bottom of your list of things to do. Despite all the marking, the BEA kids have been kept very busy in November and December.

Mid-Term Exams
In mid-November, both Shally and I were kept very busy with mid-term tests for all of our BEA courses. Based on Shally's recommendations, I revised this year's curriculum to mid-term and final tests, and to have these tests run for an entire week. One of the challenges Shally had with speaking tests last year was that there wasn't enough time to test all the students in only three days. For this year, students had four different tests to take for their mid-term exam. These tests included a three writing tests (vocabulary, grammar and paragraph writing) and a speaking test. While students were taking one of the writing tests, Shally would call one student at a time to the office for his/her speaking test. Our testing period was much more manageable this year, so we'll definitely keep these revisions in our curriculum for next year.

One of the biggest challenges I had was the actual writing of these tests. Test-writing is indeed one of the hardest teaching skills to develop. This is because it's not possible to test everything that has been taught in the classroom, so you have to pick-and-choose the most important elements from the course to test. In addition, you also have to decide how to test the content you've taught in the course, such as multiple choice or short answer questions. I used a variety of testing methods, and as a result, it took me three entire days to finish writing the twelve tests for the Basic, Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses. I really felt that I made the test more challenging that the ones from last year, but there were a few students in the Intermediate course that finished the vocabulary test in less than 10 minutes!!!

Shally has the hardest part of the testing process, which is marking all of the tests. He's finishing up the last of his marking, and he's planning on returning the tests this week to students.

If you interested in how we test the BEA kids, you can see a sample of the Basic Writing and Speaking Tests at the end of this blog entry.

Cambodian-Japanese Writing Exchange Project
The Cambodian Writing Project between the Intermediate and Pre-Intermediate courses with my students at Aoyama Gakuin University is coming to an end. My students just finished up their third letter to their Cambodian writing partner. For this letter, students had to explain a Japanese tradition or festival to their partner. In last week's lessons, students got the chance to discuss their letters with their groups. Japanese New Year traditions and the Star Festival were two of the most popular topics written about in their letters. In many of the letters, students included photos and drawings to help their Cambodian partners visualize parts of these traditions.

I've noticed that the length of the letters have lengthened a great deal during this projects. Many students are now writing five to six pages to their partner. This may be a response to the length of the letters from their Cambodian partner, which have been longer than those from their Japanese counterpart. It also could be the result of increased motivation towards their English studies since students are able to have an authentic communicative experience in English. Regardless, I'll find out more next week once I collect the project surveys next week from all the participants. Although this is the last letter for the Japanese students, the Cambodian students still have one more letter to write (Cambodian write four letters while Japanese students write three letters due to more flexible scheduling on the Cambodian side). Their last topic is the different types of education in Cambodia. My Japanese students will get their last letter in their last day of our course in January.

From this small project, I've collected over 1000 pages of research from both the Japanese and Cambodian students. One of my biggest challenges for next year is to start going through all of this research and publishing a few articles.

Back to the books ...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Review Week & Observations

26/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

It's only Tuesday, but it feels liked I've done a week's worth of work in the past two days. Unfortunately, I couldn't go into BEA this afternoon because we have to prepare for student conferences and pre-registration this Thursday and Friday.

Review Lessons and Teaching Observation:
Since we finished our final test last week, we're having a variety of review lessons this week. For yesterday's day lesson, I was able to download an EFL reading lesson on the Pyramids of Egypt. However, those lesson always have to be rewritten for the Cambodian classroom, especially the teaching notes because they are not nearly detailed enough for less experienced teachers. For this lesson, I wanted show Shally how to teach the same material to different levels with a special emphasis on vocabulary teaching.

The students were familiar with the pyramids since most of them vaguely remembered the topic from high school. However, as predicted, the vocabulary was the foremost interest to the students. Although it's not necessary to understand every single word when reading, Cambodian students insist on knowing every word. Shally has implemented a very effective teaching strategy: he allows the class to ask for only vocabulary explanation for three unknown words (this is in addition to the ones already pre-taught before the reading activity).

As usual, I model the the lesson in the Basic A course, and then Shally teaches the Basic B course on his own. I'm available during the lesson just in case he needs support for new teaching techniques. In the pre-intermediate course, I model only certain parts of the lesson that Shally would like to observe before he does it on his own.

One of the biggest improvements I've noticed in Shally's teaching is his elicitation and vocabulary teaching techniques. When Shally first participated in one of my teacher training program about three years ago, one of his difficulties was eliciting background knowledge from the students. I was very impressed at the ease in which he does it now.

During the observation of the Basic B course, I even learned a new vocabulary memory technique from him. For example, after he has written down the vocabulary list, he will erase two to three words. Students then have to shout our the missing words from the list. Despite my many years of teaching, I'm happy to still be learning myself!

Final Tests:
I'm still marking the final tests - a little over half way done now. Overall, I'm very impressed in the progress most of the students have made in paragraph writing. Students have a much better grasp of organizing their ideas and as a result are writing more coherently. In the next few weeks, I'll upload some of the examples onto the website.

Interestingly, I've noticed a consist error among most of the students. When students had to respond to a short-answer question, many answers "He had a cold because he rode his bicycle under the rain." I asked Shally about this and he explained that students are directly translating from Khmer.

When I head back to Japan at the end of September, I'll have a suitcase full of journals and tests to bring with me. I hope to have a few research papers written (and published) by the end of the year on Cambodian English.

Accreditation:
Although it seems that I'm quite busy, Shally has been even busier than me. BEA has applied for accreditation from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MOEYS) so that we can issue our own certificates, which would be equivalent to certificated earned at high school. Shally has had to make several trips to the Ministry, and has had to prepare hundreds of pages of documents in the past two weeks.

Well, that's been the start of the week at BEA...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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School Supplies and Motorbike Rides

24/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

The past few days were quite hectic at BEA, especially since we have just one more week before we’re closed for the summer vacation.

School Supplies:
Shally and I spent most of Friday morning at the Preah Vihear Book Center ordering supplies for the new school year, which will start on September 5. We’re offering four courses for the 2011-12 school year, and we’ll have almost 100 students, which means we need more supplies. As usual, BEA students will receive all their school supplies for free. Their orientation package includes one textbook, two notebooks (per semester), a book bag, and a pen case with two blue pens, a red pen, two pencils, a highlighter, a correction pen, a ruler, and a pencil sharpener. If students use up their pens and pencils before the end of the first semester, they are given new ones. We were able to get everything at the Preah Vihear Book Center, except the pen cases, so we had to visit a few other book stores in Siem Reap before we found them. I budgeted $1000 for all the supplies, but surprisingly the grand total was $920. Now, we just have to get the textbooks.

NGO Administration Training Program:
I met Rie for a late lunch on Friday to evaluate her NGO administration training program. She said that it was a very valuable experience, and would highly recommend it to other students interested in NGO work. She also said that she was very surprised at the amount of work and time needed to run a NGO, and was shocked that just Shally and I were able to run an entire school on our own. My next job is to go through her evaluation and training materials, and revise this program so that we can offer it as a permanent training program from February 2012. Although the evaluation was over, Rie’s work for the day was not. We kept her working until the last minute of her stay.

Final Tests and Writing Journals:
BEA students started the second part of their final tests, which consisted of paragraph writing. While the students were writing, Shally finished the speaking evaluations. Shally now has a lot of marking to do within the next few days, and then has to calculate the final grades for the second semester. Also, we collected all the writing journals from students. I’ve started to go through them so that I can come up with topics for research papers before the end of the year. In addition, I’m planning to put some of the students’ comments on the website as “testimonials” to their learning experience at BEA. Overall, I was quite moved at the effect BEA and Shally has had on improvement their English abilities and their lives.

Rie’s Farewell Motobike Ride:
Rie finished up her last day at BEA in the office organizing all the supplies for the 2011-12 school year. We’ll really miss her help, and wish she could’ve stayed longer. I was so impressed with her dedication and hard work, and especially at how quick she was able to finish all her tasks! Thank you so much Rie!

Before Rie left on Saturday, Shally took her on the back of his motorbike through Trapeang Sess Village and the Angkor countryside so that she could see where our students lived and worked. I followed behind on my motorbike, and had a bit of trouble navigating the winding, dirt roads, especially since it had rained the night before, and everything had turned to mud. We headed out into the Angkor countryside along some very narrow paths, and unfortunately I ended up with a flat tire. Shally’s uncle just happened to be in a rice field nearby with his water buffaloes, so he was able to help us get my motorbike back to the main road to get repaired. Fortunately, Rie made it back in time to catch her bus to Phnom Penh. Always drama with Shally and I until the very last minute!

Next Week:
Anyways, we’re back to work tomorrow at BEA and it’ll be another busy week. Shally will be holding student conferences and I’ll be dealing with pre-registration for the new school year.

Back to work even on Sundays…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Final Tests for Semester 2

21/7/2011

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Hi there everyone,

It's been pouring rain this afternoon in Siem Reap. I gave up my bicycle and have been riding a motorbike for the past few days. This is the first day driving in the rain. Despite being soaked to the bone, I was able to make it back home safely.

MOEYS:
Today started out quite early with a morning visit to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, but more commonly know by its acronym MOEYS in English. Shally and I made the 30-minute trip on his motorbike to file some paperwork for BEA. All went well, but we'll still have to make a few more trips in August.

The government offices are located on a compound-like area outside of Siem Reap. It's a bit far, but quite convenient because all the main offices are within walking distance of each other. On the way out, we passed the "Ministry of Religion and Cult". I didn't think anything was really wrong with the sign, but Shally pointed out that it should've read "Ministry of Religion and Culture". Whoever made the sign actually ran out of space, so he could only include c-u-l-t.

NGO Administration Training Program:
I spent most of my day at BEA today with Rie, our NGO Administration trainee who is participating in BEA's pilot NGO Administration Program. Yesterday, Rie learned about basic office management, consisting mostly of opening and closing student files. Today, she got a crash course in basic accounting. She got a pile of receipts that she had to categorize as fixed, variable and miscellaneous expenses and then design an excel spreadsheet to include all of these expenses. I really wish she was staying for more than two weeks because there's so much more I could give her to help us out, especially since we're preparing for our second school year. Regardless, I'll be meeting Rie for lunch tomorrow to evaluate her two-week training program. Once we make revisions, we're hoping to offer this training program to others who are interested in NGO administration. This will help BEA get some much needed funding to expand our school next year.

Final Tests for Semester 2:
While I was in the office for most of the day, Shally was running our final tests for semester two for all of our courses. Over the year, each student has had to complete six tests, which consists of a written and spoken test. The written test is spread out over two days: the first day is devoted to vocabulary and short-answer questions while the second day focuses on paragraph writing.

During the first part of the written test, students also have to complete a speaking evaluation. They are given guidelines on what to say, and then have two minutes to prepare their answer. Shally then evaluates their speaking ability based on fluency, pronunciation and grammatical accuracy. For example, for the final speaking test for the basic course, the student had to look at a series of pictures and then tell a story using the simple past tense.

Despite the pouring rain this afternoon, every single student showed up for today's test. I'm still amazed at their dedication to their studies.

Back to the books now...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Poster presentations and Volunteer Program

20/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

We're back on the BEA blog after a short break since March. I had to return back to Japan unexpectedly in mid-March after the level 9 earthquake to make sure my husband was alright in Tokyo, and to prepare for a possible evacuation due to the Fukushima nuclear accident. Fortunately, the situation is slowly getting better.

For the past few months, both Shally and I have been quite busy with finishing up the last part of our second semester. I've been helping with lesson planning, test preparation and curriculum revisions from Japan. Shally has been even busier with implementing our program, evaluating the students and managing BEA!

Poster Presentations
I was back at the school on Monday, and students were starting their final Task-based Project. Over the year, they've had to complete six of these projects. They consist of designing a poster around a particular theme, and then organizing a 10 minute presentation with their group. I was so impressed with the progress all of the students have made over the year, especially the students in the basic courses. Students who started with very basic speaking abilities can now give presentations and speak about themselves and about Cambodia quite fluently. Shally has indeed done an amazing job at teaching and supporting the students throughout the year.

NGO Administration Program
Also, we are running a two-week NGO Administration Training Program and a Cultural Awareness Volunteer Program with one of my students from Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Rie approached me last year in our Communication course, and ask to learn about NGO Administration. She's now taking part in a pilot program consisting of different aspects of NGO work, such as project design, data base construction, office management, accounting, purchasing, among many other NGO-related tasks. We hope to offer this program on a permanent basis from next year to others who might be interested in learning about NGO management. Rie has also help test our Cultural Awareness Volunteer Program, and I'm meeting with her later on today to discuss how me can make it a permanent part of BEA's curriculum. The purpose of these programs is ultimately to establish a permanent source of funding so that we'll be sustainable in the long-term.

Final Tests
In addition to training Rie on office management today, I'll be designing the very last writing and speaking tests for the second semester. During the year, students have been evaluated on a monthly basis on both their writing and speaking skills. In total, they've had six of these test throughout the year. Shally will have to run the tests this Thursday and Friday, which means he'll have quite a bit of marking to do this weekend.
You can view photos from this week's task-based projects in our photo gallery on the home page menu.

Happy to be back!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Mid-term Speaking Exams at BEA

Last-minute Mid-term Exam Study Groups

Mid-Term Exam Week at BEA

TOEIC Testing

Mid-term Tests and Writing Exchange Project

Review Week & Observations

School Supplies and Motorbike Rides

Final Tests for Semester 2

Poster presentations and Volunteer Program

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