DELE: The holistic scale

Recently, I have finished the course for DELE examiners of the Instituto Cervantes. It is a course everyone must do in order to get the official accreditation to be an examiner in the DELE exams. In my case, I did "B" levels (B1, B2). I have chosen this course because in South Korea (where I am currently working as a Spanish teacher), most of the Spanish students prepare these exams rather than A or C levels. The course has lasted 1 month and it has been done entirely online, through simple but straight activities and tasks and full of interesting information regarding the DELE system as well as the CEFRL (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Nevertheless, the most interesting part of the course has been the evaluation system it follows using the holistic and analytic scales in the conversational part of the exam. And it is the holistic one I want to talk about:

- The holistic scale is a method to measure the communicative competence of the candidate. That means, it measures the ability, the candidate has, to get on with the communicative situations that are presented in the exam tasks. It has in consideration the capacity of understanding, the linguistic knowledge, the ideas to resolve the tasks, etc. Here you can see the holistic scale of the B2 DELE exam in Spanish:

As you can see, the holistic scale is divided between 0 and 3 points, being 0 the lowest result the candidate can obtain where he/she is barely able to communicate and even needs the help of the examiner to understand and answer the conversational activities; and being 3 the highest result where the candidate is considered to speak outstandingly well for this Spanish level and proves an excellent fluency with little help coming from the examiner.

This scale does not focus on how much Spanish does the student know (at least not entirely) but rather in the ability the candidate has to think in ideas and how he/she communicate those ideas. Now, that is an interesting point for me as a Spanish teacher for Korean students.

Generally speaking, the Korean student tends to follow a very strict discipline to study the grammatical structures and the vocabulary related to DELE but it is in the holistic scale where he/she has more problems

If there is a problem that Korean students present not only when studying Spanish but also any other language is the inability (some, not all) to think and see the reality outside the box. When I practice in class with my students the DELE exams, the most common complaint I hear is that of "Teacher... I cannot think about ideas to do the activities..."  This reality often disables students who, even if they meet the requisites for passing the DELE exam, are unable to generate ideas and solutions for the oral activities and because of this they end up failing the oral part and in many cases the whole exam.

I will not go into full detail of why this happens to Korean students (at least not for now) but I must say that it is in this moment when the teacher more than ever, must stay by the side of the student and guide him/her and make him/her see the reality from another perspective (to think outside the box). A simple activity I do to begin opening their minds is that of thinking of a concept/word, any and from there think of another things that can be related to the first concept/word and explain me why. 

For example: Let´s think about: SCHOOL. ¿What other things are related to this and why? Well, we may think about: CHILDREN (because children study in the school); PARENTS (because children studying in the school usually have parents); TEACHERS (so far we have not been replaced by extreme intelligent robots in the schools); POLITICIANS (their decisions affect highly to the education system thus the school); ECONOMY (if the national economy is not doing so well, usually the schools are affected by cutbacks); TECHNOLOGY (little by little schools are being modernized by it); BULLYING (very present in nowadays school); etc. 

There we have 7 concepts that we can connect with the first one. Through them, the student can develop new ideas and perspectives that allow him/her to be more communicative and can become more talkative in order to solve the activities presented in the oral part of the DELE exam. Because, deep inside, what we all want when we learn a new language is to understand and communicate in that language.