Teacher: Do you understand?

Student: Yes.

Teacher: Good.

Introduction

Think about your general day-to-day classroom practice:

• 1 Why do you check what your students have learned?

• 2 When do you check what your students have learned?

• 3 How do you check what your students have learned?

Checking students’ understanding

Checking understanding is not something which only takes place in tests or exams. It should be a core part of your teaching practice, and what happens in your language learning classroom. However, you should also be careful not to ‘over-check’ as it can be quite demotivating for students to constantly be asked questions. When teaching in challenging circumstances, knowing why, when and how to test is even more important, because of the many other factors which make learning difficult.

• • Classes may be multi-level (see ▸Chapter 10), meaning that there is likely to be a large gap between the strongest and weakest students. Students may therefore have different levels of understanding. Some may understand the new language quickly whilst others take more time.

• • Large class sizes (see ▸Part III) make it more difficult to get accurate or individual data about students’ levels of understanding. You may therefore need to get more general or approximate data.

• • Textbook issues (see ▸Part VI) lead to students facing difficulties in doing homework or checking their understanding after the class.

• • Fewer learning resources (see ▸Part V) mean that students may not be able to write notes and make a record of what they learn in class. This makes it more important that teachers check regularly within classes.