Nigerian imitation of EL Gazette

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. We at EL Gazette were more amused than angry at this copy of "Educational Gazette" which my managing editor, Melanie Butler, picked up at the Study World conference earlier this week. Eagle-eyed (and indeed less observant) readers will spot the similarity between typefaces on the masthead. You could hardly miss it!


Even if EL Gazette could prove there was some offence being committed under Nigerian law, it would almost certainly be a big waste of time pursuing action through that country's courts.

The launch of EL Gazette's all-singing, all-dancing whistles-and-bells redesigned website seems to have been slightly postponed, so related articles of interest will continue to appear on this blog.

Vietnam EFL 'out of control'

ENGLISH language schools in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon) are now proliferating so fast that its private English as a Foreign Language (EFL) sector is ‘out of control,’ according the English language Vietnam news website Vietnam Net Bridge. Nguyen Van Cuong, of the city’s Education and Training Department says that there are now 474 registered private EFL schools under its supervision, and that ‘the task of controlling the quality of English education centres in HCM City is quite a challenge.’

Setting up an ‘international centre’ teaching EFL under an ‘international’-sounding brand name is relatively cheap, and Mr Cuong said that it’s possible with an investment of as little as 2 million dong (£78) in a prime location. Opening another branch of an existing school requires much less bureaucracy than setting up a new school from scratch, so that most schools have two or three branches in the city, with some schools operating as many as 20 branches.

Operating multiple branches means that chain schools can send their existing teachers into several schools, rather than having to spend money on hiring new teachers. Students sign up in the expectation of being taught by ‘highly qualified native-speaking teachers’ only to find that these are often backpackers who are very thinly spread around many different branches of a school. One student complained to Vietnam Net Bridge that he had signed up on the promise of four days a week out of five, but now he gets to be taught by a native speaker only once a week.

Other sharp practices in Ho Chi Minh City’s mushrooming private EFL sector include frequent unsubstantiated claims that schools’ certification is internationally recognised. And complaints about false advertising go beyond claims about native-speaker teachers. One school projected a ‘luxurious appearance’ to a student, named as Minh Nghia,’ when he came to enquire about enrolling, but put that student in ‘small and stuffy’ classrooms. A staff member at the centre gave assurances that his class would have a maximum of 20 students, but the class turned out to have 30 students, with new students constantly added as they enrolled. "The class is too crowded and it’s really hard to listen to the teachers’ words,’ said Nghia.

A language centre director, speaking to Vietnam Net Bridge on condition of anonymity, said that ‘English centres owned by Vietnamese universities inside their campuses, which in the 1990s were very popular, and whose payments were only several 10,000 dong, (just under $4) can barely survive,’ as ‘low-cost English centres are now losing ground to the ones whose fees are in the millions of dong or even in US dollars,’ fuelled by a popular belief that teaching using a high proportion of native speaker teachers automatically translates into higher quality.

Renaissance of the Gulf

From EL Gazette, February 2009

The numbers of Arabian Gulf nationals studying around the world continue to rise, with little sign of the global recession

Matt Salusbury

Writes

Where are students from the Gulf states of the Middle East going to study? The ‘Gulf states’ are members of the Cooperation Council for Arab States in the Arabian Gulf, which are Bahrain, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Oman, the states of Kuwait and Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE, which including Abu Dhabi and Dubai.)

Some countries have no statistics for enrolments from individual Gulf countries, and lump students from there together as ‘Middle East,’ which includes Turkey and North Africa. Australia is one such country. English Australia’s figures for the EFL sector lists 5,500 from ‘the Middle East’ in 2007, up 60 per cent on 2006. Within this group, enrolments from Saudi Arabia doubled in that year, totalling 7,300 Saudis studying in Australia as of October 2008.

Australia takes recruitment of Gulf students so seriously that a Parliamentary Sub-committee covered the issue back in 2005, urging Australia to capitalise on ‘recent restrictions to student visas and perceptions of the US and the UK as being "unsafe" and "unwelcoming" destinations for students from the Middle East and Gulf’.

New Zealand, helped by a low exchange rate for its currency and the perception of the country as a safe place, is enjoying a surge in Saudi enrolments. There were only 76 Saudi students in New Zealand in 2006, but by 2008 these had almost tripled.

Ireland’s latest (2005) figures show 300 Kuwait students, many of whom were studying in Ireland’s five medical schools. Eight per cent of all medical students are from Kuwait and four per cent of them are from the UAE, making them the fourth and fifth biggest groups in medicine by nationality. There were over 150 Emiratis in Ireland in 2005, with Emiratis outnumbering Saudis.

Ireland has seen a recent increase in Saudis on the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme, Nearly 90 per cent of these are male, and they’re mostly on part-time ‘non-degree’ business or English language courses.

The Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada (AUCC) told the Gazette that the number of students from all Gulf countries on student visas on Canadian campuses has grown rapidly, with nearly 70,000 fulltime students in 2006. The AUCC said that Arab students are especially numerous at McGill University and the universities of Ottawa and Toronto. The latest (2005) figures show that 23 per cent of Gulf states students in Canada were female, this proportion is 10 per cent more than a decade earlier.

In Spring 2008, Canada relaxed immigration rules on student visa-holders who settle there after a course of study, and Gulf News reported that Emiratis in particular are taking advantage of this change.

Back in 2006, the American Council of Education warned that ‘students from the Gulf States… are choosing to study in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia rather than coming to the United States.’ Their report cited year-on-year declines in enrolments from the Gulf – by one fifth in Oman’s case - and concluded ‘this is part of a larger pattern of decline among Muslim countries’ in the wake of 9/11 and the Afghani and Iraq wars. The recent ‘Obama bounce’ seems to be improving global perceptions of the US, which may encourage Arab students back there.

America’s efforts to entice students from the Gulf states include the State Department’s education arm in the region, AMIDEAST, which opened bigger accommodation with a separate teaching centre in Muscat, Oman, in the summer. Before the move, AMIDEAST’s Muscat operation was already handling 130 visitors and 200 calls a month, all enquiring about studying in the US.

AMIDEAST will open an office in Qatar soon, and is already marketing State Department-sponsored Youth Exchange and Study Program scholarships for Qataris to study in a US high school for a year. Qatar’s ‘Education City’ outside the capital Doha includes five US university campuses, compared to one British university (Herriot-Watt) and one Australian university (Wollongong) in the Gulf, both in Dubai.

America’s 1991 liberation of Kuwait means Kuwait has close ties to the US. The National Union of Kuwait Students said that in 2008 there were ‘1,500 Kuwaiti students studying at universities in the US, Egypt and the UK on scholarships from the Kuwait Embassy. Another 500 Kuwaiti are enrolled privately in American universities.’

Saudi Arabia’s gigantic King Abdullah Scholarship Programme (KASP, see here) is focused on the US, with a target for 25,000 Saudis to be studying in the US by academic year 2009-2010.

The Gulf states don’t just send students to American universities, they (especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) are the biggest donors to US university endowment funds. This facilitates more of their nationals coming to study there.

In the UK, the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show over 3200 Saudi higher education students in the UK in 2007, up 18 per cent on the previous year. Kuwaiti and Qatari numbers were up by about the same proportion, with well over a thousand students from each state, and there were 600 Qataris. Emirati recruitment was more modest (seven per cent up, to over 2200) and Bahraini enrolments were down.

The British Council Kuwait is now starting training and accreditation for local educational agents. UK Trade and Investment recently identified ‘financial and professional education’ in Saudi Arabia and Qatar topping the list of ‘opportunities’ for export to these countries.

Scottish universities seem particularly adept at marketing to the Gulf. Glasgow’s website markets its diverse home city’s large Muslim community, with the most mosques of any city in Scotland. (The University of New South Wales also markets its tolerant and cosmopolitan home city of Sydney, Australia, and its university mosque where 400 Muslim students attend Friday prayers.) Meanwhile, London’s EFL providers are telling the Gazette they're having trouble coping with the influx of King Abdullah Scholarship Programme Saudis.

South African EFL providers report that they’re receiving more Saudis of a younger average age, helped by relatively easy visas. As we go to press, a South African mission to the Gulf states is arriving in Dubai, with the Gulf States acting in concert on agreements with South Africa on tourism, hospitality, leisure and nuclear energy technology transfer, but no mention of education yet. Talks are also about to start on a pan-African trading bloc with the Gulf states, with South Africa as a senior partner.

In Gulf countries that have no elections, national leaders are acutely aware of the need to constantly drive ‘reforms.’ Several Gulf states are committed to reducing their dependence on an expatriate workforce, and on training up their own nationals to replace them. All this will mean continued investment in English-medium education. All Saudi primary schools will teach EFL from 2009, for example, with English as the medium of instruction for all mathematics and science in the Kingdom from 2011.

But there’s still a chance that increased demand from the Gulf could stall. At the end 2008, Saudi Arabia was, according to the Guardian newspaper, ‘expected to cut back on both current spending and adjust ambitious long-term development plans in the light of the slump in (oil) prices.’ Qatari and Emirati government run investments funds have taken a pounding through exposure to US and European share price crashes. Boomtown Dubai is starting to see a slowdown, while Kuwait recently took the extreme step of closing its stock exchange for several days to stop share prices ‘haemorrhaging.’ But the same report re-assures us that even in a global recession, the existing assets of the Gulf states will ‘remain massive.’

Irish evolution

The market for business English courses in Ireland continues to grow and evolve

This article first appeared in the English language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008

The business English market in Ireland is growing. But, as Adrian Cummins of the Irish national association for English language schools MEI-Relsa told the Gazette, Ireland is keen to ensure that there’s a good mix of general business English courses and more ‘high-end’ intensive courses for executives, and a mix of nationalities on those courses.

Thirty per cent of the employees in Dublin’s International Centre free trade zone are reportedly non-Irish nationals, and most language schools in Ireland now offer business English courses, usually ‘combination’ programmes, with, for example, general English in the morning and business English in the afternoon. Students on combination business English courses are a mixture of executives, those relatively new to business and a new type of customer – longer-term students from international companies sent to Ireland.

The executive sector is a growth market which is being actively targeted, especially executives from Spain, who take advantage of Spanish government MEC grants to study English. Few EFL schools in Ireland offer business English exams. Some run courses that end in the Cambridge Esol Business English Certificate (BEC). Adrian says some business English students ‘like to be certified’ at the end of their course, and thinks these tend to be university students at the pre-experience end of the business English market.

Work experience programmes have always been a strong point in Ireland and continue to grow, with students from Germany, France and Italy particularly well represented. These are typically four to six weeks long and ‘cross sector’, with stints in all sorts of industries. A lot of work experience people find placements in IT or administration. Some schools offering work experience specialise in certain markets, with one school having won a contract with a Korean company for business English courses followed by an internship.

Current target markets are ‘those where visas are easier’, countries whose nationals don’t need a visa to study in Ireland for a stay of up to three months, like Korea or Japan.

With the relatively sudden influx of migrants to Ireland, there’s an embryonic public- sector Esol industry, with further education colleges offering general Esol to migrants, most of whom come from the EU. Adrian says that privately owned business English providers are already encountering competition from this new sector.

Gary Tennant, director of business English courses at Dublin’s Atlas Language College, says that when he came to the UK five years ago he found that in ‘quite prominent schools, business English was topic-based with a heavy reliance on textbooks’. Now schools like Atlas are emerging as business English specialists. Atlas now offers tailored programmes, with clients choosing from a menu of skills-based mini-course options.

Kilkenny School of English in the south-west of the country also seems to be branding itself as a specialist business English school, with tailored in-company business English classes, and by moving into the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) market.

How are teachers recruited for Irish business English courses? According to Adrian, ‘teachers recruited through the usual means’ usually have a the initial Celta qualification or the higher Delta or equivalent but not a specific business English qualification. Adrian wasn’t aware of any course provider in Ireland that offered specialist courses in teaching business English. He admitted that there were not a lot of business English teachers and that there’s a demand for ‘teachers with proper criteria… We’d like to attract more native speaker teachers, although work permits are an issue.’ Gary says that the quality of training courses has improved vastly over recent years, with accrediting body Acels ‘upping the standard every year’.

Glossary:
Celta - Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching for Adults
Delta - Diploma in English Language Teaching for Adults

Matt Salusbury, news and features editor English Language Gazette
Copyright: English Language Gazette

Indian destinations

Where are Indian students going to study abroad?

Traditional destinations shouldn’t take Indian students for granted as they look at more exotic options

Matt Salusbury reports

This article first appeared in the English language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008

India is a huge market for English-medium higher education courses. We emailed India-based subscribers to our digital newsletter asking them about where Indians are going to study abroad.

According to ELT professionals the US, UK and Australia are the most desirable destinations for Indian students. One also mentioned Canada, while another identified Singapore as a big destination.

Which markets are growing as destinations for Indian students? ‘Australia is becoming more attractive. Europe is the next attraction because they are more friendly and affordable,’ said one. Another view was that ‘Australia, Singapore and Russia are gaining fast. Many medical students are also looking at options in China and Russia as studies there are less expensive than India and the US and the UK.’

Australia and Singapore are perceived by Indian students as countries for which it’s relatively easy to get student visas. Germany and France have a reputation for advantageous arrangements for student grants and tuition fees, with France in particular becoming a favoured destination for research students.

One respondent told us, ‘Many Ielts candidates state that they are going to Australia because they have heard that getting an Australian visa is easier than getting a visa to the UK and US.’ Universities Australia last year signed ‘international counterpart agreements’ on student exchanges with India, which should result in more Indian students in Australia.

When it comes to visa hassles for the US and the UK, we were told that these two countries are ‘feared’ by Indian applicants.
A sharp fall in the quota of H1-B work visas issued by the US for skilled professionals, capped at 65,000 visas per year after 9/11, was keenly felt by the non-resident Indian diaspora, and the assumption seems to have taken hold that student visas are also much harder to get.

What reasons do Indian students give for choosing a course abroad, and why don’t they instead choose to study at one of the over 113 higher education institutes in India? Admission to specialised higher education courses within India is seen as limited, with ‘candidates screened with stringent entrance exams’ and the policy of positive discrimination making access to these institutes difficult for those not covered by ‘reservation’ – keeping a percentage or quota of university places for applicants from lower castes. Other factors attracting Indians to study overseas are ‘better job prospects, greater status in society and larger pay packets after studies.

Indians abroad mostly study ‘postgraduate and technical courses – MBA, commerce-related and applied sciences are the preferred courses. Most students go abroad for postgraduate studies, although the number of students opting for undergraduate studies abroad is also up.’

It’s clear that the traditional destinations for Indian students had better watch out. Increasing numbers of Indians are going to study in countries that aren’t even regarded as English-speaking – Germany, which issues student visas to Indians for postgraduate study only, France and the rest of Europe, Singapore and even China and Russia for medical training.
It seems to be a difficult process to open a joint venture university in India, with probationary periods of state approval to go through and huge ‘security deposits’ payable to prevent a foreign university closing up after only a few years and stranding the students. But some of the traditional markets for Indian students are establishing a foothold in India beyond the usual recruitment office they have based there.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s India visit last year saw the launch of the UK–India Education and Research Initiative. Coventry University is now running a physiotherapy degree with Bangalore’s MS Ramaiah Technology Institute, and University of London’s external study business courses can now be taken at the University of Delhi. Open Universities Australia also has centres in four Indian cities. US universities such as Yale are hoping to open greenfield site campuses in India. It’s likely that more Indian students will in time go for a higher education course with a foreign university based in India, rather than actually going abroad.

Thanks to Francis Peter, who is a teacher trainer at Loyola College Chennai, and to Hutoxi Randeria, who is a freelance educational consultant.

Copyright: English Language Gazette

Head for the Highlands

Scotland’s distinctive higher education system is increasingly attracting international students from around the world

Matt Salusbury writes

This article first appeared in the English Language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008

Scotland’s education system is widely regarded as the best in the UK. It has traditionally had proportionally more university places than the rest of Britain. Some of its universities are much older institutions than even Oxford or Cambridge, with one group of Scottish universities known collectively as ‘ancient universities’.

Figures supplied by Scottish Universities for students in higher education in Scotland put the total number of students (both UK and international) at 223,000. Of these, 12,500 were overseas students from other EU countries and 24,000 were from outside the EU. Some overseas students may find their school-leaving qualifications actually put them at an advantage when applying for Scottish universities compared to other UK entrants. This is because Scotland has a different system, with ‘Highers’ school leaving exams leading to a four-year degree in a Scottish university, compared to A-levels leading to a three-year degree in the rest of the UK. Susannah Lane, a researcher with the Scottish Universities association says the ‘perception of the four-year degree as the gold standard in education serves as a pull factor. Another big draw is Scotland’s ‘research base which is known internationally to be world class’. A comfortable majority of international students are in Scotland on postgraduate courses, and half of these are on research-based rather than taught ones.

Kelly Ferguson of Education UK Scotland suggests a ‘vast array of reasons’ why students chose Scotland, including ‘friends or family connections… safety and security on campus (and) culture - traditional and modern.’ She also cites the range of scholarships available for study there.

The most popular subjects for overseas students are business, which just beats engineering, then computing, biological sciences and ‘medicine-related.’ The ‘Watt’ in Heriott-Watt University commemorates Scottish engineer James Watt, and Napier University is named after a mathematician. Both of these universities pull in a lot of international students in these subjects, with Heriott-Watt recruiting many overseas architecture and business students too. Glasgow University seems to specialise in attracting overseas biologists. Strathclyde University had over 700 international students on its business courses in 2007.

But two less well-known universities seem to have carved out niche markets for foreign students. The Paisley-based University of the West of Scotland has the most business students from outside the EU, while Robert Gordon University has the most non-EU students in engineering, architecture and computer sciences. Dundee University seems to be doing rather well in recruiting non-EU students taking a variety of subjects.

The number of overseas students on further education (FE) vocational courses is surprisingly low. Of the 50,000 students who do FE courses in Scotland in 2005, only 310 are from other EU countries, and there are only 1,045 non-EU FE students. Non-degree FE courses are a growth market all over the English-speaking world, so this number can be expected to rise, especially given Scotland’s long-held reputation for excellence in technical subjects.

In 2001, there were students from over 100 countries studying in Scotland. The top ten countries of origin for sending students to Scotland as of 2006 were, in numerical order, China with just over 5,000, the US, India with nearly 4,000, Malaysia with over 3,000, Hong Kong with almost that number, closely followed by Ireland, then Canada with 2,000, Germany with 1,980, Greece with 1830. France is tenth, with1,500 students at Scottish universities.

The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has its own 2005–2006 figures for students from outside the EU studying in Scotland, and these list Norway, Nigeria, Taiwan and Japan as the biggest non-EU countries of origin after Canada.
There has been a steady rise in the total number of international students in Scottish universities. HESA figures list India and Nigeria as showing the biggest growth.
Non-EU international student numbers are rising much faster than for students from the rest of EU outside the UK. ‘Other EU’ student numbers have seen only a slight rise overall since the 1990s. While funding arrangements differ slightly in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK, the bigger increase in non-EU admissions could be partly down to the fact that universities can charge these students a lot more, so they become a marketing priority.

And let’s not forget higher education distance learning courses based in Scotland. Scottish Executive figures for 2006 put the total number of distance learning students based overseas at 18,000, and they outnumber the 14,400 who are based in the UK. Most of these distance learning students are postgraduate, with less than a thousand overseas students doing undergraduate first degrees by distance learning.

Matt Salusbury, news and features editor, English Language Gazette
with additional reporting by Michael Bowden
Copyright: English Language Gazette