Techniques and Technologies of Teaching Speaking: Dealing with Backwash Effect in Russia

Introduction

It is common practice these days in Russia to substitute developing learners’ oral speech skills with training them for a better testing performance. These tasks often take the format of “form filling” and essentially contribute to the learners’ testing competence rather than to their communicative ability.

The reason for such substitution is easy to find. This phenomenon is called the “backwash effect”, which has been created by a spectacular experiment on a nationwide scale in Russia – training school leavers towards Russian National Exam in English. Today we can talk about the apparent predominance of blank filling activities at the English language lessons taking away all the teaching time intended for communicative practice. Not only has thechief idea of communicative language teaching been actually scrapped away, but the authenticity of communicative language testing followed the suit.

Doing multiple-choice and matching activities, restoring logical sequences in sentences and texts, filling in the missing meaningful elements, focusing on language formalities and discourse mechanics rather than on producing meaningful messages – these are but a few tendencies of recent developments in Russia’s language classroom routines. As a result, the actual communicative level of school leavers in English is being compromised by the scoring of learners according to the returns of the formal testing procedures.

The need is being felt to look more attentively into the practice of introducing open examination tasks with an emphasis made on candidates’ communicative abilities rather than on their proficiency in a variety of filling in a number of testing formats and the degree of learners’ test wiseness.

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