'The Times They Are A Changing'

'TEFL teachers' are a rare breed of folk and, in my experience, an extraordinarily eccentric, eclectic mix of individuals.  We have to be to choose to enter a profession that offers;

• mainly short term contracts
• itinerant /  migrant worker status especially at the outset of your career
• poor rates of pay, especially when starting out as a newly trained teacher and most especially in the UK (when compared to other professions)
• little chance of stable career paths
• few opportunities of  working long term in your country of origin

Outside the UK, there is a notably positive attitude (almost respect) for the native speaker English teacher, I do not feel this is so at home in the UK and certainly, perhaps until recently, not the case in Higher Education and this is mainly due to the image I portray above.

For most of my 20+ years in UK HE I have witnessed attitudes that have ranged from amusement and puzzlement to suspicion from my colleagues in Academia and I can not say I blame them when I think about how we end up in this profession.  I was working on a building site when I decided to train, and my motive was to travel the world with a transferable skill not to enter a profession!

In my experience it is a reasonably rare thing to be recognised by academia for our expertise, our dedication to the quality of provision for our students and for being the highly (multi) skilled professionals we are. However, with the recent focus of higher educational institutions on the 'Internationalisation Agenda',  English language professionals in the sector are increasingly being approached to engage with the academic community and administrative departments to provide input across a range of institutional developments and strategic agendas, which go far beyond the delivery of English language teaching to class groups of overseas students.

This increased, invited, engagement in the wider context inevitably leads to us (the ELT professionals) being able to showcase just how multi skilled we are and to offer to further share our expertise in an even wider context. We are after all, even without the academic background, pretty knowledgeable in cross cultural communication, (usually) very able trainers for other skills other than teaching language and have a wide  range of intercultural competencies that we are able to share with others.

Today has proven to be quite a momentous one for my department as two proposals put forward by ELTS' staff members for papers to be delivered at the Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching's Excellence in Learning and Teaching Conference have been accepted by the selection panel.  One paper describes the highly successful Professional Development and Support Programme for International Staff, the other is on ELTS' work on the development and delivery of our  Portfolio Based Assessment Methodology.

You'll have to come to the conference for more information!

The success of getting these papers approved for the conference highlights just how far the reputation of the English language profession at Swansea University has risen over recent years, and this acknowledgement of our ambition for excellence in everything we strive to accomplish is hugely motivating for my team and should offer added confidence in us for our exceptional student body.

Thoughts on The Appropriacy of Assessment

For the past 22 years it (assessment) has been a constant issue and challenge in my work with English language learners. The truth is, and it is an accepted truth in my profession, that there is no better form of assessment or assessor than the skilled language teacher, we work closely and for extended periods of time with our learners and therefore get to know their abilities, capabilities and aptitudes and are therefore able to make far more detailed accurate judgements than any summative test ever could. However, this 'subjective' form of assessment has not and could not be recognised as entirely valid as none of the recognised criteria for the creation of  a valid test could be applied and ultimately the subjectivity could always be questioned.

Discussion of assessment in the form of formal examination has been an educational strategy driving theme ever since practical examinations to widen access to state employment were introduced in Imperial China approximately 2000 years ago. In the UK formal qualifying examinations were first introduced in the early nineteenth century, industrialisation had led to an ever expanding middle class who now realised that education was a means to improving social status and so encouraged their children to aim for the professions who, in tun, desired to control membership.  Formal examinations were subsequently introduced into the university system, and the educational system in general, as a major part of the selection process.

Historically assessment can be seen as a tool of social control and eduction is required to serve the particular values of the society in which it is placed.

What has always interested me is to what extent culture, both social and academic, affects the development of a particular form of assessment, we know that students are educated differently in different cultures and are also assessed differently; we regularly deal with students who have been accused of plagiarising or committing 'Unfair Practice' for activities which in their culture are acceptable, even required academic performance.

At ELTS we have been doing some ground breaking work over the last 18 months looking, especially, at how we can assess students in a way which provides them with a method with which they can engage, in terms of their reflection on the learning process, providing detailed feedback that offers clearly defined stepping stones to their progress and which allows a great deal of formative and self assessment take place along the way to summative final assessment, and at the same time meeting the requirements of the academic culture in which they have chosen to study.

While engaged in some background reading on this subject I came across the following quotation which I think perfectly supports my introduction and now has a place on my office wall as a constant reminder of the potential pitfalls that need to be reviewed as we meet the ambitions of the direction we are moving in.

A response from the Indians of the Six Nations, 1744, to a suggestion that their send boys to an American College.

“But you, who are wise, must know, that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this Kind of education happen to not be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces: they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were Bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods....neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing.

We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind Offer, tho we decline accepting it: and, to show our Grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and Make Men of them.” 

(Clark.J 1987. Curriculum Renewal in School Foreign Language Learning. Preface)