Why small countries do well at FCE?

From the February 2010 EL Gazette

LOOKING at the latest scores for Cambridge Esol First Certificate English (FCE) exam results, there are some striking trends. One is the handful of small countries that seem to do exceptionally well.

The small former Soviet state of Belarus (population 9 million) has a 95 per cent pass rate in FCE, and 27.9 per cent of Belarusian FCE students get an A grade. Little central American nation Costa Rica has a 100 pass rate in FCE, while modest-sized EU ‘accession’ state Slovenia has an 89 per cent FCE pass rate, and a 22.5 A grade score. 88 per cent of Serbia’s FCE candidates pass, with about the same proportion of A grades as Slovenia. Sweden – with about the same population as Belarus - has a 93 per cent FCE pass rate, and a similarly high A grade score. Bahrain, the smallest Gulf State, has a 90 per cent FCE pass rate, much higher than any other Middle Eastern country.

What factors result in these very high scores? By comparison, the pass rate for FCE in the UK is an unimpressive 65 per cent, probably the result of the tendency of some language schools to put students through exams long before they’re ready. Russia has a 79 per cent pass rate for FCE, but a much lower proportion of grade A passes, only eight per cent. Sweden’s score can’t just be attributed to its language’s closeness to English – neither Germany nor Holland, with languages closely related to English, do particularly well at FCE.

We asked Cambridge Esol’s media relations officer Stuart Giblin if there was anything in the statistical set that could account for these scores. He got back to the Gazette to say that the samples on which the high scores for FCE were based for Serbia, Slovenia, Costa Rica, Bahrain, Belarus and Sweden were ‘statistically insignificant’ – in other words, so few people were taking FCE in these countries, that we can’t make any meaningful comparisons with bigger countries where the pass rates and A-grade rates are based on much bigger cohorts of candidates.

But the Gazette has done some digging of its own. We may be completely wrong, but we think we’ve identified factors in the small six – Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden Costa Rica, Belarus, Bahrain – that could account for their high scores, with possible lessons for those running exam classes elsewhere.

One clue to Slovenia and Serbia’s exam success is the origins of these countries, both are former Yugoslav republics. Socialist Yugoslavia had an impressive reputation for education, and some of the better elements of that system seem to have stuck. Vincent Smidowicz of Sidmouth International School, a consultant to City and Guilds, told the Gazette ‘Serbia does have excellent educational and cultural standards; earlier this month was my first visit and I was very impressed.’

Belarus’ high FCE score may be down to a local peculiarity, the Belarus Testing Initiative, devised by the British Council’s Belarus office back in 1997, with the support of the country’s education ministry. The Testing Initiative overhauled the country’s then prevailing antiquated system of oral exams for school leavers, followed by university entry exams written by the individual universities, taken several months later. These were replaced with exams deliberately aimed at integrating Belarus more closely into Western European higher education, with exam papers developed by a Thames Valley University consultant. Could this mean that international exams devised in the UK, such as FCE, have become more familiar to Belarusian candidates?

Swedes generally do very well at English, and it seems that some Swedish state schools – unlike the school systems of most other Northern European countries – put their pupils through FCE. Several UK universities that take a lot of Swedish students. In recognition of the generally high level of education in that country, some UK universities will take Swedes –often as relatively short-term exchange students - into their first year of a undergraduate course with just a Swedish gymnasium diploma plus an FCE.

And Bahrain? The numerous guides for expatriates on living and working in Bahrain emphasise the importance of the lucrative one-to-one exam tutoring market, with particular surges in demand as the exams season approaches, and in the re-takes season once the results are out. Bahrainis, it seems, will pay for personal training to get them through EFL exams.

According to International House Costa Rica’s executive director Marcela Devine, Costa Rica has a tiny sample of people taking FCE – only about 50 candidates a year, mostly young adults - in its main test centre in the capital, San Juan. Ms Devine told the Gazette that the country’s FCE success ‘is entirely due to good candidate preparation… we offer a mock exam several months before the exam and use the results for organising exam preparation courses.’ UK language schools please note!

EU's ERF cash up for grabs

By Matt Salusbury

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

The European Commission opened applications for its huge European Refugee Fund (ERF) in January this year. In the context of the EU’s English-speaking countries – the UK and Ireland – the fund will make available in its first year €1 million for English classes aimed at migrants to Ireland and other projects aimed at integrating refugees there, and £1.7 million for similar projects in the UK.
The ERF has a total of €759 million (£576 million) for the period 2008–13 to ‘improve the efforts of member states to grant reception conditions’ to refugees. In the UK and Ireland this translates into cash for Esol projects. The UK’s Border and Immigration Agency has invited tenders for projects aimed at refugees, including in its advertising references to ‘local authorities, adult, FE and Community Colleges wishing to offer or expand capacity for Esol courses’. In Ireland it is the Reception and Integration Agency that will distribute ERF money.
The ERF will fund up to 80 per cent of eligible Esol projects, which can last up to three years, with awards ranging from £30,000 up to a maximum of £303,000. Applications for this year’s round close on 31 May. Schemes need between two and 24 partners, all of which must be not-for-profit organisations. The director of an ethnic minority community centre in north London that runs Esol projects told the Gazette he believed community groups would stand a better chance of securing ERF funding if they became part of a bidding consortium with larger organisations.
The ERF succeeds the European Fund for the Integration of Third Country Nationals, which in the UK and Ireland provided some funding for Esol and citizenship classes for legal migrants who had arrived from outside the EU in the last five years.

Copyright: English Language Gazette

Cultural conversions

English as a Foreign Language teachers tired of the same old grind make ideal candidates for conversion to cross-cultural trainers

Matt Salusbury talks to cross-cultural training experts

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

There is a lucrative industry in cross-cultural training (also called intercultural training) currently opening up, and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers have obvious transferable skills that can help them benefit from a move into this area. (See pages 16–17 of the March 2008 Gazette for an introduction to the subject.) But what does the job entail, and how do EFL teachers go about becoming cross-cultural trainers?

Neil Payne, of Kwintessential Ltd Cross Cultural Solutions says that trainers come from all sorts of backgrounds. The majority have worked internationally and understand the complexities of working across cultures, are Tefl teachers, have been expatriaes or have grown up in foreign countries and gone into training, and then you also get people nowadays who have taken the academic route into training through an Masters Degree.

Recent graduates of cross-cultural training courses at International House (IH) London include Yu Sun, who teaches Mandarin and trains businesses to work with China, Bryony Kate Howard, who used the cultural training course to convert her language clients in Germany to cultural clients and to get new business, and Rie Ota, a teacher of English and Japanese. Neil feels that EFL is an excellent way into intercultural training as you’ve already had exposure to working and living in a foreign country, and can then become an ‘expert’ in that culture. And through teaching you develop a lot of training skills including confidence in how to manage a group of people.

Barry Tomalin, director of the Business Cultural Trainers Certificate at IH London, also feels that teachers can make good cultural trainers. ‘They used to say in the BBC that it was easier to turn a teacher into a producer than the other way round. It’s the same with cultural training but we need to recognise the differences.’

English teachers, says Barry, have the techniques to help students learn. Cultural trainers are judged by whether they meet the client’s agenda. The clients control the agenda and their agenda is improving business performance in overseas markets or working with overseas teams.

This agenda has to be delivered in blocks of one or two days or half a day, as business managers are extremely busy. It is much closer to management training than to language training. and can be a lot more stressful.

In cultural training the aim is to find out what people need to know to achieve a particular business aim, learn what the business issues are likely to be and then find the right way to address them. The feeling and approach in the training room is very different to the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom.

What have EFL teachers got to offer? We are trained to be aware of and to be able to conceptualise differences in language. We are also trained to teach by activities. We follow the learning cycle of activity, debrief, conclusions and implementation. Cultural trainers tend to talk; language trainers tend to get people to do things. Most language trainers have lived and worked abroad so they understand what it is to live and work in a different environment and have experienced some of the psychological challenges of doing so. This is experience that we can use to the benefit of the managers we are training. We also gain, as a result of living and working abroad, a host of stories that we can use as part of our work.

Barry believes there’s a lot of ‘smoke and mirrors in cultural training. Most trainees have no interest in the culture they are dealing with as such, or if they are interested it tends to be a by-product rather than the aim of their work. Cultural training also has a number of business models, principally those presented by such theorists as Hofstede, Trompenaars, Lewis, Mole and Bennett. You need to know these and to be able to teach a system that your trainees can apply.

Ultimately, what you are teaching is life skills. When working with overseas partners and clients the rules change. Understanding the key communication and business cultural differentiators such as attitudes to time, relationships, decision-making and organisation are crucial to making the right business judgements with foreign clients and partners. What you are doing is teaching these skills and initiating an international mindset which will make your trainees more responsive to international business requirements.

There are three main kinds of course. One type is cultural briefing, exploring what is it like to work in or with people from another country. Then there’s mobility – training people to live abroad, training people to live in the UK or training people to settle in back home after a secondment overseas. And there’s international team building – working with a team which may be a virtual team that communicates through email, phone and video conferencing.

Cultural training and coaching can pay better than language training. Barry says that companies may charge between £1,500 and £2,000 per day and sole traders tend to charge £1,000-plus. Neil says trainers are paid anywhere from £500 to £1,000 per day, and 95 per cent are freelances who work for a number of consultancies. Very few would go into permanent employment as a full-time trainer although some consultancies do have in-house trainers too. Barry says, ‘Your clients initially will probably be companies you know and have previously worked with in the language field, although converting them from language clients to culture clients can take time.’

A number of training companies offer in-house training courses, and companies such as LTS Bath run five-day train-the-trainer courses for aspirant cultural trainers. The IH London Business Cultural Trainers Certificate offers a three-day intensive course in how to research, design, market and deliver courses for managers. There’s also highly rated seminar in Oregon, USA, which takes place at the Intercultural Communication Institute, Summer Institute, run by Milton and Janet Bennett.

Glossary
ELT - English Language Teaching
EFL - English as a Foreign Language
Tefl - Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Matt Salusbury, News and Features Editor, English Language Gazette
Copyright: English Language Gazette
MA - Master of Arts, Masters Degree

Published articles update 07 01 08

My website has finally been updated, for the first time since June (whoops!)
New additions include:

Curse of the Daleks, the forgotten Doctor Who West End stage production from 1965.

Northern Iraq gallery - pictures from my visit to Iraqi Kurdistan, Spring 2004

My report on Weird Weekend 2007 for Fortean Times is on their website now.

My interview with Queen of Burlesque and parapsychologist Kitty Klaw appeared in Fortean Times issue 232, March 2008. Here it is on one of Kitty Klaw's websites. (Updated 2013).

My Guardian Weekly feature on the “Save ESOL” campaign (July 2007) is now online

The United States 1763-2001, by John Spiller, which appears to be the standard history textbook for the final years of High School and the first year on university in that country, quotes one of my articles in BBC History from way back in 2002.

I’m down to speak on pygmy elephants at the CFZ’s Weird Weekend in August 2008. See also Nick Redfern's announcement on this.

My Time Out (London) article on the Anarchist Bookfair is now (much later) on the Time Out site.

Photographer/writer collaborations - the text to photographer Alex Masi’s photo series is now on his website at http://A Vampyre’s Tale1 click on “Text available” at the bottom left of that page.

ESOL students end of term outing to see Gordon Brown

One of the first delegations to be received by brand new Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who started work on Thursday, was a group of students and teachers of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) on Friday 29 June protesting the introduction of fees for courses and cuts to the sector (See blog entries on ESOL below). The demo opposite parliament and the delegation to Downing Street followed a cursed and ill-fated 'ESOL protest picnic' by ESOL students from London Further Education colleges.
This was originally planned as a march and rally for Saturday 30 June, but this clashed with London Gay Pride, and the idea of lots of veiled Muslim ladies turning up at the end of the Pride parade was not one the organisers wanted to try out. The weather - after a week of floods and severe weather warnings - just about held on the day of the picnic, but in the event, at least one college withdrew its permission for its students to go on a school trip that morning, following the two bomb alerts right down the road from the St James's Park picnic venue.
ESOL students who are trying to register for courses next year are already being turned away in droves by the few colleges that have already opened registration. The government announced as part of concessions made in teh Spring that ESOL students on benefits (including Housing Benefit) or spouses of those working but on a low income who produced their wage slips would get full "fee remission" for ESOL courses. But no advice or guidlines seem to have filtered down yet to the college admissions departments, which means that they're still turning these students away based on old criteria that hasn't yet been updated. One class at a North London college, that would normally be full already for next year, has only three students who are able to enroll for next year.
Teachers in the lecturers' union UCU are planning a "public ESOL lesson" for the start of term in the second week of September, in which they threaten to teach ESOL classes in the street outside colleges for those students who have been turned away because they can't pay fees.
The photo shows the delegation preparing to enter Downing Street: UCU Associate General Secretary Paul Mackney (white hair, glasses), Aylin (curly brown hair, black top), an Hourly Paid Lecturer (HPL) on a temporary contract, a category of teacher likely to bear the brunt of the coming cuts in further education, and ESOL students from London further education colleges. The second photo shows the ESOL demo by students and teachers over the road from Downing Street.

Report from Save ESOL march and rally, London, 28 April 2007

Save ESOL march and rally, 28 April 2007

About 800 people - mostly students and teachers of ESOL (English as a Second Language) attended three feeder marches and a rally in protest against cuts to free ESOL provision in England generally, and London in particular.

The push to get migrants to sign up to ESOL classes, delivered free of charge using the Basic Skills Agency Skills for Life curriculum, has been the most successful educational intitiative of the Labour government, with ESOL tripling in both the numbers of students entrolled and the total budget since 2000. So there was widespread bemusement when, in October, Minister for Lifelong Learning Bill Rammell declared that the demand for ESOL classes was "unsustainable" and announced that ESOL students not eligable for Working Tax Credits would have to pay at least a third of course fees, and that asylum seekers would no longer be eligible at all for ESOL classes.

A concerted lobbying campaign followed, with many ESOL teachers taking advantage of the so-called Citizenship strand embedded in the ESOL curriculum to get their students to write their first ever letter to their MP (in class time) to protest these changes. There followed a huge lobby of Parliament (about 1,000-strong) by ESOL students and teachers in late February by ESOL students and teachers, big enough to overwhelm Parliamentary security who shut down the visitor's entrance to the House of Commons. And there were debates on ESOL in the Lords and the Commons.


Concessions followed, with Minister Rammell announcing that the much more straightforward Housing Benefits form would be used as an indicator of 'low income' in deciding whether students for free evening classes, and that asylum seekers who had been awaiting a decision for over six months could get on ESOL classes. But these concessions were pretty much cancelled by recent news that London, where over half of all UK ESOL classes take place, would see a £25 million cut in Further Education (FE) for 2007-2008, which would mean that ESOL teachers would be laid off and some classes closed. This was the background to the march and rally.

There were three feeder marches - Highbury (which included students and teachers from City and Islington College, and Haringey's College of North East London) which marched along the Balls Pond Road to meet two more feeder marches from Hackney and Tower Hamlets.

Latin American cleaners working around Canary Wharf and organised in Justice for Cleaners, a group set up by the Transport and General Workers Union, were a noticeable contingent on the Highbury march. Jake from Justice for Cleaners told me that they were starting up ESOL classes for cleaners through the union's new Migrant Support Unit (earlier attempts at starting up ESOL classes for their membership through an FE College were "confounded by bureaucracy"). He addes that promotion to supervisor level among cleaners seems to be entirely down to their level of English.

There was also a large Somali presence on the march. Many Somali women couldn't read or write only a few years ago, and are now becoming much more confident in expressing their needs. For many of them, this was their first demo, and when a petition came round, some asked what it was - they'd never seen one before.

Many of the banners and placards emphasised the contrast between the money available for the war in Iraq with the lack of money available for education. A early teenage street gang from Highbury joined in the march for a laugh, joining in chants of "Tony Blair, it's not fair!"

At Hackney Town Hall, a brass band struck up The Red Flag. Hackney Council officials ordered demonstrators off the steps - their was a wedding coming out. Hackney Mayor Jules Pipes had reportedly telephoned the police earlier asking them to ban the march completely from the square in front of the Town Hall, but the police had refused, and stewarding was low-key.

The "2008 ESOL Choir" paraded with their mouth duct-taped up. With local elections approaching in other parts of the country, activists from Respect and the Green Party both told me they had propaganda leaflets about ESOL printed up for the elections. Oli Rahman, a Respect councillor in Tower Hamlets who spoke on behalf of George Galloway MP, who couldn't make it, said he would put up a motion in the Council opposing the ESOL cuts.

Trish Smith, of the Adult Learning Service and the Learning Trust, said it had been proven time and time again that "children will do better if their parents can support their education" for which they needed English, and that cuts to ESOL would affect the "skills targets" London had set itself for the 2012 Olympics.

College managements rarely stick their necks out in opposition to government policy, but the star speaker was Ian Ashman, Principal of the local Hackney College. He pointed out that the money from the ESOL cuts would be shifted into workplace learning scheme Train to Gain, and that "60 % of Train to Gain money is not being spent."

Turkish-Kurdish groups were well-represented on the march, including the Anatolian Peoples Association whose banner read: Free English Language Tuition is a Right. One Turkish woman had a placard which read Inglizce Ogrenmek Hakkimizdir, which she translated as Learning English is Our Right. There were many bilingual or multilingual banners.

Documentary maker Nick Broomfield, who made "Ghosts", an investigation into the Whitley Bay Chinese cocklers, sent a message of support in which he said, "While making Ghosts I realised that one of the biggest problems was language. Many did not have enough English to have a conversation. Many illegal Chinese are skilled doctors and jewellers but they cannot make their skills known." Jeremy Corbyn MP (Lab, Islington North) described the policy on ESOL as "a no-brainer" and demanded that "if the government insists the people should have a reasonable standard of English - give then to tools to do it!"


Last week, London Mayor Ken Livingstone made a surprise announcment that he had found £15 million to "save" ESOL in London, £10 million from the local development agencies and £5 million of the Mayor of London's budget. The Mayor of London doesn't even have a formal responsibility for education, and it's the biggest Mayor of London spend on education yet. Some see his intervention as a power struggle with the London Learning and Skills Council, an attempt to take it over and put it under Mayor of London control. (It's a central government agency at the moment.) College Principals began announcing redundancies among ESOL staff that week, and some have since had to announce that these are delayed.

Then later in the week, the Department for Education and Skills announced £35 million for ESOL in London. £15 turned out to be Livingstone's money already pledged, and the remaining £10 million was split between the already dodgy-looking Train to Gain and "new" ESOL classes. In any event, ESOL has suddenly become very political.