TELC - Like Tests Based on Authentic Materials

Artykuł dotyczy możliwości zastosowania programu Paint i PrintScr do przygotowania testów wraz z przykładami zadań wzorowanych na egzaminie TELC B1, przygotowanych z artykułów z czasopism. Artykuł wyjaśnia możliwości wykorzystania materiałów objętych prawem autorskim do celów edukacyjnych.

TELC - Like Tests Based on Authentic Materials

by Danuta Nowak

The Internet is a wealth of information just at your fingertips. Any title is legally or illegally
available, yet testing your students is mostly centered in what your course-book publisher has
offered to a lazy teacher. OK, if you want to, you can print out or photocopy the ready-made model.
If you have to, you can edit the editable versions to suit the needs and levels of your students. But
such tests look strange to the digital generation that you teach. For them, the image and the layout is
more familiar that the script. This is what course-books have, but the unit tests or progress tests in
the teacher’s pack don’t. You teach them reading comprehension by looking at and describing
pictures in the book, and then test them without this visual aid.

Preparing your own tests by adapting texts from newspapers or other books or even
inventing your own ones is time-consuming. Moreover, these texts are not necessarily interesting
and up-to-date for telly-addicts. So, I discovered a less hard but more interesting way to prepare
tests. Namely, the PrintScr button.

There are many newspapers and magazines right in front of you but the easiest to use are
daily digital editions. They give the latest news, which is short, concise, with a good and catchy
headline and an interesting photo. The language is simpler than in glossy magazines, and the
articles are short, divided into columns, and the more
local the newspaper, the more familiar are the articles.
Some well-known examinations to which our
students want to prepare, also include short messages, signs,
notices and advertisements. We all know that to make one
advertisement that really looks like an advertisement is very
difficult in terms of time and idea. But such newspapers
have loads of them, divided by category and edited by
professionals, full of colour and images. Just look at this.
Isn’t it nice?

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All you need to do is find a digital edition of a newspaper, read page after page until you find something
easy enough and interesting enough in terms of subject, structure or vocabulary and:

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press PrintScr button,
open Paint and press Copy.
use Choose to choose what you don't need and delete it,
choose frames of various colour to highlight your news, like this:

press Copy and Paste it in your ...