busy?

rather a slow week, or at least it's felt that way - maybe it's the weather. And again, frustratingly, not much going on on the Dip. front. I want to complete my current workbook in the next few days (the distance Dip. Tesol is split up into workbooks), then try and do as much as possible over the summer before I'm inundated by the shitwave of work that inevitably breaks over me come september. So far this week, I've been working on publicity for the PT & FT EFL courses, marketing strategies (too little, too late, in my opinion: The university's sole overseas agancy is about to be closed, meaning that we probably won't be getting much in the way of FT students for the new academic year), and, of course, portfolios. It finally looks like they've crystallised. Basically, the FT programme will use the portfolio in very much the way they were originally designed to be used, vis. a showcase of each student's best work. However, the Programme Leader will set out prior to the start of the programme what work needs to be covered, and from that the minimum number of items that need to be included. On top of that, and to encourage students to work, having a complete portfolio will be in some way a requirement of course completion, and prizes will be given for the best portfolios.
For the PT programme, because of time constraints and its more specialised nature, the portfolio will be used more in the way I originally envisaged it, i.e. a way of delivering specific tasks that conform to ECF freamework descriptors and show students the type of tasks they may face in PET, FCE, CAE and CPE. It means we can spread the exam skills workload over the whole of the course, rather than trying to cram it from halfway through the course (don't ask why this is: suffice to say it's a long story involving fundaing regulations for FE).
Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with what I've hammered out - now all I have to do is sit back and see if it bloody works.

Another rather slow and plodding monday. Currently working on the whole portfolios idea - it's evolved a bit. just a bit. Currently, the idea is to use the European Language Portfolio as the core for students to reflect on their own language skills and what they want to do with language, followed by a reflective diary-type thing, possibly on the net, then sections covering functional and notional skills. The headache lies in the latter. I don't want to be too proscriptive as to what can and cannot be done, yet it would be desirable to have concictency across several levels in the same learning cohort - it means we can match students to the ALTE framework and give us a really accurate snapshot of a whole academic year, covering accuracy of initial placement tests to end of year results. It'll also give us standardised pieces that would make Internal Validation, and external for that matter, much easier. However, saying 'this and this must be in the portfolio, but not this' isn't desirable, as it ignores the students' needs. In addition, each class may have subtly different needs that require addressing. It's all rather thorny.

step forward, step backward.

Well, it's been a frustrating week. I don't feel as if I've done that much - something I put down to sitting in front of a monitor until my eyeballs bleed, rather than being up and on my feet in a class. Most frustratingly, I've done hardly anything on the Dip, something which really bugs me. I'd like to have done more, but work stuff and a house full of ill people has put paid to that. Made some progress on the portfolio design, only to find it seems to be getting more and more complex and involved than I first thought.

Red Face....always remember..

...to do your research before you write! How many times do I tell my students that? Further to the previous post about SATs, I find in fact that the majority of the marking is actually done in the UK, and not, as implied on the BBC this morning, abroad. The problems allegedly come from the lack of training and support ETS Europe provide, alongside an apparently appalling system for transporting and delivering papers. This doesn't surprise me. ETS are probably better known for running the TOEFL, quite possibly the worst Academic English exam in existence. And why is an American company dealing with British exams in the first place? Just an example of shoddy government - go for the cheapest contractor, and to hell with the futures of the children being tested.

SATs, contractors and doing it on the cheap

Off the topic of ELT, but still educationally related - The SATs(Standard Attainment Tests), sat by 11 and 14-year-olds in the UK. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle, to put it mildly, at the delay in releasing the results this year. There's been more disgruntlement at schools, where teachers have been resending marked papers because of inaccuracies in the scoring. So, what's going on?

the papers have been sent off to be marked to a company contracted to do it, presumably the cheapest one available.

Its name?
ETS Europe.

The marking of the SATs has been subcontracted to a company not based in the UK. In other words, British students' work is being checked and marked for accuracy in somewhere other than the UK.

I can't begin to describe how shocking I find this. It's wrong on so many levels. Now, if it was just a case of a multiple choice paper being fed into a computer, I could accept that. If it was just checking the result of a maths paper, where you can only have a correct or wrong answer, I could just about accept that too. But it seems (and honestly, I couldn't be more glad if I were wrong on this point) that the entire lot is being sent off. OK, you can make a point abour objectivity in marking: The examiner will have a set number of descriptors against which he/she will check the submitted work, and based on that assign a mark. However, I can see so many ways that marking will be inaccurate.
Just a few examples:
Orthography. The way that UK kids are taught to write is significantly different from the way it is done in other EU countries. This is a fairly neat example:
, and it's written by an adult! Imagine an 11-year-old's being deciphered by an examiner.

Cultural and Social mileau. Taken out of context, how can anything relating to a culture or society be accurately interpreted, let alone assigned a score in an exam?

Examiner's L1/L2 competency. No matter how good the examiner's English may be, nevertheless they will be marking and interpreting at one remove - that is, they will have to decode the information, recode into L1, interpret according to two sets of cultural and possibly sociolinguistic filters, then assign a mark and re-encode into English. There is no way it can be done entirely fairly, as any examiner in this situation will use affective filters in the process.

All I can say is that it's WRONG. Totally bloody WRONG.

Acquisition within learning

Insight: In acquisition, learning does not occur. In learning, acquisition may occur. By this, I mean that when we acquire information, in this case languages, we do not consciously analyse, criticise or judge what has been acquired: It just is. However, when we learn, we apply a critical process - we may ask ourselves what we are learning for - in other words, there is some form of conscious motivation involved. Even though this happens, some information is (uncritically, non-judgementally) acquired. We see evidence of this where students, even in the midset of ropey writing, produce a perfectly executed phrase or sentence or turn of speech. It indicates that that phrase has been acquired syntactically. If we were to ask the student why they used that, they would probably not be able to give a good reason.
Just thought I'd share that with you.

Portfolios

This is a work-related post, and a warning. Never volunteer ideas too loudly - you might get saddled with redesigning an entire syllabus, as I have done. And I've only got a few weeks to do it in!
Actually, it fits in fairly neatly with the curriculum and syllabus design section of my Dip studies, and it bodes to be a hell of a lot more interesting than doing plod work on the Summer School. It also chimes in with a few ideas I've had about running the part time programme and how we keep students from drifting away, as often happens when their work/life/study balance changes.
Basically, it centres on using student portfolios. It's not a new idea, and in fact there is, somewhere out on the Interweb, a British Council document about using a learning portfolio, which for the life of me I can't find. The idea and structure is simple. Each student creates a portfolio of work which is proof of work done over a course, and contains marked and internally validated work covering the main skills. It will also contain a 'biography' section, a 'personal vocabulary' section (for vocab students come across in everyday life rather than in the classroom), a reflective diary and individual learning plan for them to identify what their targets are. So far, so good.
The difference comes in two places: How it is delivered and how it is differentiated. I'm weighing up how much of the portfolio needs to actually be on paper and whether it can't be done using our online learning platform, Blackboard. Anyone who's used this bit of software will know how clunky it is - it's very old as a piece of software and relies on plug-in modules to keep it up-to-date - and how it tends to render users rather passive (and here I mean teachers and students). However, with some nifty wrangling I think I may be able to do something usable. Actually, it does have its own version of a portfolio as a plug in, but it's really not much more than a glammed up CV. There is also the issue of technophobe students, and even more technophobe teachers. Currently, I think that the portfolio can be in parts delivered online, but with backup documentary evidence to place in a file. For example, the reflective diary can be in the form of blogs, which would give them much greater flexibility - students can use alternative ways of recording what they're doing, including pictures and sound recordings. The various marked tasks might be done both electronically and on paper.
Which last point leads very nicely onto differentiation. By this, I mean not only differentiation across levels, but also across the courses. For example, we have an evening Effective Writing course: It would be rather ridiculous having the students complete a portfolio that has elements not related to their study needs. In addition, one feature of this course is that students bring in real life writing situations into the class, and so a portfolio should cover this - perhaps by some kind of case study, analysis and solutions - some kind of report, perhaps. For the classes that cover Exams - for example, FCE, CAE etc. - the portfolio requires tasks that directly relate to the type of tasks they will need to do in exam conditions, but without being tainted by Backwash.

The most important differentiation task will be across the levels. Here, I intend to use the Common European Framework to identify what students are expected to be able to do and how they express it. For example, in the 'biography' section, I envisage the lowest level students just completing a simple form asking for basic details, while a higher level student might be expected to write a CV and sample cover letter, or write a more complex biography.
Well, that's the idea, anyway. Wish me luck.