One of the more interesting presentations I
heard at SBL San Diego was by Randall Buth. The premise: there are no widely
accepted tests like TOEFL that measure achievement levels in ancient Hebrew.
Such a test is needed, but what would it look like?
Randall gave interesting examples of
Hebrew-only test questions. A standardized proficiency test, he argued, should
not favor speakers of a particular language other than Hebrew. Translation into
a second language should be avoided for that reason.
I couldn’t help noticing people going through
his sample test questions as he spoke. A number of people broke out into a cold
sweat as they realized they would get a pretty low score if they had to take a
test like the one Randall proposes. Between administrative tasks and teaching
survey courses, the Hebrew of Bible scholars tends to be, let us say, a tad
rusty. Maybe it never was much to speak of.
Not everyone felt uncomfortable. Stephen
Kaufman stood up right away, praised the concept with considerable passion, and
noted some issues in the execution. Buth is absolutely onto something.
In this post, I throw in two cents of my own
with respect to the issue of how best to test proficiency in ancient Hebrew. In
my view, the ability of students to construct oppositional word pairs from a
list is an excellent Hebrew-only method of testing proficiency in vocabulary. A
component of the test might involve asking students to correctly vocalize the
vocabulary items.
Based on your knowledge of ancient Hebrew,
rearrange the alphabetically ordered list into oppositional pairs. Vocalize
each item. Check your results with the alphabetized list of pairs provided in
the preceding post. You are free to report your results, or those of a friend
of yours named Henry, in a comment.
Set A
אבה אהב
בכה דבר
האריך החיה
הכאיב הכה
המית המעיט
הצדיק הקציר
הקריב הרבה
הרחיק הרשיע
התכבד התענה
חבש חשה
מאן שחק
רפא שנא
Thanks, John. That was fun.
I think I'll use this to start next term off.
Rob
Posted by: Robert Holmstedt | December 07, 2007 at 07:12 AM