In the field of the modern pedagogy, people are talking much about how important it is to evaluate the learning. But it is still discussed in an argumentative manner how the learning check has to be. As far as language teaching is concerned, one talks about the so-called “classification tests”, which are to stream the students or to find out in the run-up of a language course, which course could be the right one for the student. The development of these tests is complex and quite lengthy because you have to determine important factors and to check to which level of competence they belong. For this reason, there are only few experts who attend to this task, although they are, as mentioned above, very important for language teaching.
Besides these tests, there are, moreover, final tests, which the students have to do at the end of a language course and which prove that the students have achieved the goals which have been set at the beginning of the course. The development of the tests are here also complicated because the tasks have to be adapted to the course contents.
There are so-called official exams, as in Spanish for example the “Diplomas de Español como Lengua extranjera” (DELE), which verify in an officially acknowledged way the linguistic competence and the learning level of the students.
But why is it that important for the student to participate in this type of test? The answer is simple. The exams make it possible to increase the probability to find the right language course. The right choice is in turn very useful for the student. For example, it is wrong to think that you have achieved a high linguistic level only because you know complex grammatical contents. People who think like this are wrong because you can also learn grammar by heart like mathematic formulas. You can have a high level of grammar knowledge, but still be unable to understand basic information, as for example timetables. That is the reason why it is, incidentally, very important that an exam , which is good, tests with the help of the individual tasks the different linguistic skills. These exams give a good, extensive overview of the abilities. That helps to find out which problems the students still have and in which field they have to be more supported.
As far as the online lessons are concerned, there are many schools which offer a classification test before the choice of the course. These tests are a basic precondition, if you want to profit most from your courses and your own way to learn.
Although many students think that they have achieved a lower score in the classification test than they have deserved; you always have to try to keep in mind your real linguistic knowledge. But we must not only concentrate on grammar, but also on the real acquisition of abilities. The goal of the learning process is to use the language in real context and not just to use a number of formulas which you have learned by heart.
If you want to test your own linguistic level, you can also fall back upon the thousands of Placement test Spanisch.
which the Internet offers. They can give you a first impression of what you already know. So, test your abilities!
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