Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

How I do a test

Upper Secondary Students from Lower Saxony, Germany.
(Sent to HLT by Karl Frank)

Mental Analysis

First when I get the test paper I read all the questions and I think which one I do first. Mostly it's the easiest one where I get an idea of what to write first.
During the time when I answer the (for me) easy questions, I'm self confident.
But when there are difficult things I get sometimes insecure of what to write and then I don't have any plan how to write it and in which order. In some answers I follow a from myself given plan but sometimes I don't. I write anything and mostly not in the right order.
I start in the middle, go back to the beginning and later stop at the end. Sometimes I write words I don't know their exact meaning, but I hope that I think it's the right meaning.

Before I start writing a text, I think about its main structure.
How to start and to finish.
I try to get along this structure, but there's always something I write I haven't thought of before.
When I am writing I don't stay there with my mind. I often think how to write the next three or four sentences. That's one reason why I make so many mistakes * .
After writing the text I think if I got the main idea.

I don't feel very insecure or confident writing a test. I just write it and try to get it written in a logical way, although I sometimes drift away in my own memories.

I'm planning the main structure but I fill it with associative writing. I'm going always forwards and backwards. Sometimes too often, so I loose(sic) the present. I am always focussed on what I write and not how.

* the other is I don't mind about mistakes.

As I got my exercise book and the tasks, my head was very empty and thought nothing.
After a few minutes I remembered the content of the book and tried to associate it with the tasks. During the writing I often had new ideas which I couldn't write down fast enough. But they often weren't very good so that I crossed them off again.
That was disappointing.
At the end of the test my hand got very frantic and it began to tremble. Perhaps I was nervous.
Just from the beginning I knew that the mark wouldn't be good like the last test but I tried to give my best.

First of all I make up a short summary in my mind. I compared my knowledge with the questions and thought about what I could write. I felt secure about what to write. there was no question that made me nervous. It's difficult to tell how I felt while I was writing , because my biggest problem was the time: the summary was easy to do, but when I think of the rest, there was always the clock ticking in my mind.

When I had finished, I was not happy about the structure of my text. There was too much I wanted to explain but sometimes it was the wrong place to write what I thought, so I had to build up very long and badly structured sentences to try to make clear what I mean. But in fact everything got more and more difficult. When I think of the emotions I had, I wanted to make my opinion clear. It was necessary to write with ration and logic and to go deep into the materia.

If I've had enough time, I possibly had read my text to correct some bad expressions I hadn't recognized while I was writing.

Sometimes I used some expressions I had heard in song texts or read in the Internet, and to check out if I had translated them with the correct meaning , I had to use the dictionary. They were always right, and if I hadn't looked for them I would have had enough time to check for mistakes.
My fault.