Moderating orals

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Moderating orals is a bit of a weird business …

 

Here I sit in my top-floor studio, laptop and speakers in front of me and the piles of DHL packages arranged around the desk, having (as I tweeted the other day) 10 minute bursts of intimacy with total strangers. Here are conversations recorded months ago, that (click) start … and then (click) stop, which very often carry with them ghostly impressions of that particular time and place of the recording – bursts of birdsong in the background, people talking outside the window, occasionally the sound of heavy rain, the ambulance siren in the distance rushing off to some unknown person's emergency. One school is under the flight path of the local airport, so in several recordings there is wheeeeeeee rumblerumble as yet another plane load of people passes overhead (not helpful for easy moderation!).

 

And then there are the people on the recordings, and their evident relationships – teachers and students who obviously like each other and get on well together … and those (few) who equally obviously - don't. The nervous students with that terribly vulnerable and touching quaver in the voice – and the equally nervous teachers who retreat into a stiff formality which I am sure is absolutely not typical of their normal selves. And then there's the wonderful lunatic from Central America (I won't be more specific than that) who converts the whole Individual Interview process into a circus – in-jokes, comments on the latest power cut, passing enigmatic gossip, the students cheerfully insulting him as usual … and in between, all the required parts of the interview are done, and the marking is spot on.

 

Moderation means hours and hours of concentration – and concentration of a very particular sort. The problem with evaluating orals is that the evidence is inherently transient – sounds fly past you, and you have to catch them, and interpret them, on the wing. If you stop the recording, the evidence 'disappears' - you can't hear anything. You can re-play (the introduction of CDs has helped enormously here) – but re-playing, if you think about it, falsifies, since a mispronounced phrase can certainly be deciphered eventually, but you have to mark on the basis that you can't re-play in a real-life conversation !

 

In fact, I've been doing this job for so many years now that I have a whole set of highly developed techniques to catch, sort and evaluate the flying clues. The first half-dozen recordings in each session require a fierce effort of concentration, but then all of the semi-conscious routines cut in. The conversations scroll past and all the clues light up, as it were – errors flash red, neat phrases flash green, pauses are evaluated (“ … weak language? / ...choosing the best word? / … coping with unclear question? ...”). And then, peering at the Criteria, all the little multi-coloured clues begin to group themselves into appropriate markbands - “...Criterion A – clearly 7-8, probably the top … Criterion B – borderline between 5-6 and 7-8: so, any further evidence ? … Criterion C – presentation is 7-8, but it all slips a bit in the interaction, so …?”

 

I'm writing down the whole system – partly out of self-analytical curiosity, but mainly because the notes will form a couple of very useful pages for this website !


Tags: orals, moderating, students, teachers