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Thundering parents fear thunder claps will disrupt kids' exams
By Ni Tao |
June 23, 2011, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE long-expected arrival of torrential rains has Shanghai's meteorologists and flood prevention officials on edge.
Also upset are parents of test-takers. The damp spell coincides with two tests that are accorded great importance in China - the national college entrance exam, commonly known as gaokao, and the high school entrance exam, or zhongkao.
Both tests have engendered a lot of societal distress these days, and thunderstorms, common in this season, only add to parents' anxiety. They are concerned that rumbles of thunder might drown out exam recordings and get on their children' nerves when they sit the listening English test for aural comprehension.
So it's a relief that this year's listening English test for zhongkao wasn't affected by thunder or gale, the Xinmin Evening News reported on Monday. The report didn't elaborate on the painstaking efforts parents sometimes make to ensure their children can work in absolute peace and quiet. But examples abound of do-goodism in this regard.
Two weeks ago, when gaokao dominated public attention, parents in Qingdao, Shandong Province, made national headlines with their unauthorized enforcement of a traffic ban on streets where exam centers were located.
Qingdao media reported that on the English exam day some parents waiting outside a school asked a teacher if it was possible to turn up the volume of recordings played over the PA system to overwhelm the cacophony of lashing rain and car horns. The teacher refused and got booed as a result.
The same parents' request to have car traffic banned near the exam venue was rejected by police, whereupon they took matters into their own hands, forming a human shield to block incoming vehicles. There's no better word than jumpy to describe the reaction of the parents, who, although certainly well-intentioned, were in fact messing things up, as traffic slowed to a crawl due to their meddling.
Some experts argue that English exams ought to be designed to test students' true command of the language, and that includes the ability to catch words from scratchy recordings, rather than just in a sound-proof studio, which many parents seem to demand.
Wei Mengxun, a seasoned local English teacher, was quoted by the Xinmin Evening News as saying that the ideal place for training in listening English, instead of being dead silent, should allow for a low level noise. Artificial serenity is not conducive to the betterment of language skills.
Wei is correct about what he sees as the best way to learn a foreign language, that is, through exposure to the "raw" environment in which it is spoken. This entails adaptation to some annoying niceties, like accents and tones. These are bits of information that a test paper cannot display, but understanding them is vital to proficiency in a language, so far narrowly understood as measurable by a concrete score.
The idea that language as a communication tool thrives by wide usage, not in a classroom incubator, isn't congenial to students growing up on standardized fare of rote learning, but recognition of this fact is the very first step toward relieving people's jitters over what is just a test. And life has plenty of more arduous tests.
While it's tempting to think that the parents in Qingdao are very wrong in being aggressively overprotective, or even making much ado about nothing, they themselves are misled about gaokao's much-touted significance.
Since childhood we were told by "mainstream" opinion that zhongkao would determine our future lives; then came gaokao, which reminded us that our fates were not yet sealed and won't be easily sealed with a test.
The two tests are but brief episodes in life; after years of dramatizing their significance, many are now trying to play it down, with little success. Maybe only when we awaken to the absurdity of staking our whole lives on two imperfect tests will we seriously begin to explore alternatives.
Also upset are parents of test-takers. The damp spell coincides with two tests that are accorded great importance in China - the national college entrance exam, commonly known as gaokao, and the high school entrance exam, or zhongkao.
Both tests have engendered a lot of societal distress these days, and thunderstorms, common in this season, only add to parents' anxiety. They are concerned that rumbles of thunder might drown out exam recordings and get on their children' nerves when they sit the listening English test for aural comprehension.
So it's a relief that this year's listening English test for zhongkao wasn't affected by thunder or gale, the Xinmin Evening News reported on Monday. The report didn't elaborate on the painstaking efforts parents sometimes make to ensure their children can work in absolute peace and quiet. But examples abound of do-goodism in this regard.
Two weeks ago, when gaokao dominated public attention, parents in Qingdao, Shandong Province, made national headlines with their unauthorized enforcement of a traffic ban on streets where exam centers were located.
Qingdao media reported that on the English exam day some parents waiting outside a school asked a teacher if it was possible to turn up the volume of recordings played over the PA system to overwhelm the cacophony of lashing rain and car horns. The teacher refused and got booed as a result.
The same parents' request to have car traffic banned near the exam venue was rejected by police, whereupon they took matters into their own hands, forming a human shield to block incoming vehicles. There's no better word than jumpy to describe the reaction of the parents, who, although certainly well-intentioned, were in fact messing things up, as traffic slowed to a crawl due to their meddling.
Some experts argue that English exams ought to be designed to test students' true command of the language, and that includes the ability to catch words from scratchy recordings, rather than just in a sound-proof studio, which many parents seem to demand.
Wei Mengxun, a seasoned local English teacher, was quoted by the Xinmin Evening News as saying that the ideal place for training in listening English, instead of being dead silent, should allow for a low level noise. Artificial serenity is not conducive to the betterment of language skills.
Wei is correct about what he sees as the best way to learn a foreign language, that is, through exposure to the "raw" environment in which it is spoken. This entails adaptation to some annoying niceties, like accents and tones. These are bits of information that a test paper cannot display, but understanding them is vital to proficiency in a language, so far narrowly understood as measurable by a concrete score.
The idea that language as a communication tool thrives by wide usage, not in a classroom incubator, isn't congenial to students growing up on standardized fare of rote learning, but recognition of this fact is the very first step toward relieving people's jitters over what is just a test. And life has plenty of more arduous tests.
While it's tempting to think that the parents in Qingdao are very wrong in being aggressively overprotective, or even making much ado about nothing, they themselves are misled about gaokao's much-touted significance.
Since childhood we were told by "mainstream" opinion that zhongkao would determine our future lives; then came gaokao, which reminded us that our fates were not yet sealed and won't be easily sealed with a test.
The two tests are but brief episodes in life; after years of dramatizing their significance, many are now trying to play it down, with little success. Maybe only when we awaken to the absurdity of staking our whole lives on two imperfect tests will we seriously begin to explore alternatives.
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