Abstract
Testing techniques evaluate not just the teaching/learning outcomes – they evaluate the whole spectrum of factors involved in delivering a discipline in the classroom. The motivations of teaching/learning a discipline are most concretely realised in the testing techniques and the testing outcomes. Any discipline that has not formulated well-researched testing techniques is doomed to fail because the quality testing is the prerequisite to create the strong motivation for learning the subject in its essence. In this paper an attempt is made to examine the various issues and problematics of testing practices of English studies in India. The vague and ambiguous policies, the quantity and quality of course content, the issues of infrastructure including the lack of competent teachers, the management of examination, the problematics of UGC NET and above all the quality of testing tools and many other issues are examined, and possible remedies are suggested to reorient not just the testing practices but the whole range of issues related with English studies.
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Notes
- 1.
These are just a few examples of typical questions that we find in English studies question papers. There are many other questions of similar kind. It would be a good idea to conduct a research by sampling such questions to assess their impact on teaching/learning of English.
- 2.
In the humanistic tradition many have deliberated on the benefits of literary studies. However, the postmodern approach is diametrically opposed to this view. For the present purpose, I have not taken the postmodern counterview into consideration.
- 3.
Literary studies in present times can be seriously rendered through a multidisciplinary approach. On the one hand, we perceive literature to be deeply immersed in ideological discourse, and on the other, literature as linguistic communication transcends the boundaries of language to communicate, what Lacan calls the ‘Real’ of human life. Further, if literature connects the being of humans with the ‘Real’, it also has the capacity to create the jouissance of aesthetic pleasure. These are the serious intellectual debates that a literary text germinates in the twenty-first century. But in the Indian classroom, we are still engaged with the trite age-old debates about a literary text.
- 4.
Many universities and colleges use a mix of long- and short-answer questions or even multiple-choice types of questions. But this is just a cosmetic change. The quality of the testing tools remains the same. Besides, now these MCQs are used for mass copying also.
References
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Khare, S. (2019). Testing English Studies in India: Problems and Possibilities. In: Mahanta, B., Sharma, R. (eds) English Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_15
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