Graham Davies

David writes: I have no problem either. I have the reputation of being quite a tough examiner. I agree with David that some language tests just do not do a proper job. This is true of the current GCSE exams in England. The examiners have also allowed standards to fall, as those of us who have taught in higher education have been observing for years. This was clear to us during the interviews (in German, French etc) that we conducted with new applicants for degree courses.

You can read about spyware and adware on the following Web page that I have created: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/bugs.htm I check my system regularly with SpyBot (free). See the above page and the page that John recommends for further details. Above all, be wary of downloading free programs and plug-ins from the Web. A good deal of the free stuff comes with adware/spyware that provides info to tracking sites and slows down your system. I do download some free stuff, but I also check out what its doing to my system by running SpyBot immediately after wards. A firewall may also help keep these annoyances out.

While it's true to say that there are differences in the way different subject are tested, it's wrong to imply that science subjects, e.g. chemistry, have a monopoly on "knowledge gates". You won't get far in German (my subject), i.e. communicating and understanding with a reasonable level of confidence, until you have committed to memory a solid body of knowledge - around 2000-3000 words of vocab for starters. You also need to know how to use the words in the correct context and to be aware of fundamental differences between English and German, e.g. that German distinguishes between a male cat (Kater) and female cat (Katze), as well as knowing that Kater is colloquial for hangover. As for grammar, while I would not expect a student of German to be able to articulate a (fairly rigid) rule of syntax, that a subordinating conjunction at the beginning of a clause in German causes the main verb to be positioned at the end of the clause, I would expect the student to be able to apply the rule instinctively and correctly in spoken and written German. There's no room for debate about this either: you get it right or you get it wrong. If you put the verb in the wrong position you may be understood but you are then classed as a foreigner who has not properly mastered the language. There are, in fact, numerous knowledge gates through which one has to pass while learning German. Most people - students at school and adult learners alike - only pass through the first set of knowledge gates and then they give up. A Higher GCSE covers just the basics. It's a useful starting point for serious study of the language.

I maintain two websites: 1. My business website - which also includes a large number of free resources for language teachers: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk 2. The ICT4LT educational training resources website: http://www.ict4lt.org I spend around 3 hours per week on maintenance for each site, so let's say around £7500 per year per site on labour costs - but I don't charge anyone for this! Domain name registration - can't remember exactly what this costs but I think it's roughly £25 per year per site. ISP costs (server space) for my business website: around £160 pounds per year (including email, spam filtering etc). Server space for the ICT4LT site is provided free of charge by a British university. The ICT4LT website cost 465,900 euros to initiate, 50% of which was paid by the European Commission. This covered all consultants' costs, expenses for meetings, paying writers to provide the materials, etc. I now maintain it as a labour of love. My business website gets around 40 hits per day. The ICT4LT website currently gets around 700 hits per day. Although my business is registered with Curriculum Online (COL) and listed at the COL website I can only trace about half a dozen referrals from the COL site to my business website - i.e. since COL came into existence. BECTA referrals amount to about one per month. BECTA does not even acknowledge the existence of ICT4LT in spite of the fact that it is the biggest single collection of ICT training resources for language teachers anywhere on the Web - the not-invented-here syndrome, maybe? Just a handful of referrals from the NGfL website and the VTC to the ICT4LT website have been logged. So the 700 hits per day are definitely not due to relevant information being provided by government agencies. ICT4LT has a large regular user base and most newcomers find the site via keyword searches with Google. It is therefore quite clear to me that the teachers that I target at both the above sites do not make much use of government and government agency websites. I can understand why. Government and government agency websites are difficult to navigate and far too big. Furthermore they are always being reconstructed, so if you do eventually find something useful it will probably have moved in 6 months time.

I did a bit of consultancy work for the British Army some years, familiarising language instructors with the basics of computer assisted language learning. I got the impression that they set quite high standards in the British Army – but their materials were not nearly as entertaining as those that David describes. Thanks for brightening up this miserable, rainy weekend!

There is no question that we overtest in schools at the moment – and the tests are often meaningless: they don’t help the kids, they don’t help the parents, they don’t help the teachers. As I’ve indicated before, in my subject area (modern foreign languages) we usually test four discrete skills, but it’s a time-consuming process to get a clear picture of how someone is performing across these four skills, and most of the tests that I’ve seen don’t give accurate results. In the case of speaking and listening skills the only reliable test is a face-to-face, one-to-one interview. It’s very labour-intensive, but it gives an accurate picture of the testee’s language proficiency. My HE institution used to interview nearly all prospective language students in the languages that they intended to study. Our impression was often at odds with the exam results that they had achieved, and we found the impression that we gained in the interview was generally a more accurate predictor of future performance than GCSE or A-Level results. Where there is a large intake of new MFL students into HE from secondary education a placement test is needed to ensure that they end up in groups appropriate to their level of proficiency. There is a quick-and-dirty solution, however: a vocab test. “Eh?” I hear you gasp. It depends on the type of vocab test, however, and under what circumstances it is administered. Paul Meara (University of Wales Swansea) devised a very effective vocab test for the Dialang website to ensure that the testee is not thrown into a subsequent series of tests in three discrete skills that are too hard or too easy. The testee is confronted with a large list of words, some of which are genuine and some of which are made up. The test is to identify the real words as opposed to the fake words. It sounds like a crazy idea but it works! It's the quickest way that I have seen of acquiring a rough (and fairly accurate) estimate of a language learner's level of proficiency. Try it yourself: http://www.dialang.org As Prof Wilfried Decoo (Brigham Young University) put it in a recent email to the EUROCALL discussion list: "Our experience, backed by experimental research, is that the lexical component [of a language] is the most representative in determining levels, and also the easiest and most comprehensible to define and to implement. It is therefore no surprise that the Dialang testing uses the lexical criterium as its first point of entry to determine a level." Theoretically, one could obtain a high score in a vocab test simply by sitting down and learning large lists of vocab and without paying attention to grammar and the four discrete skills: i.e. raw knowledge and no skills. In practice, however, most language learners don’t do this. They acquire vocab in context and over a longish period. The more they are exposed to the language the more active vocab they acquire, along with the grammar and proficiency in the four skills. This is why the vocab test can be a fairly accurate predictor. However, if you know in advance that you will be assessed on the basis of a vocab test than you can cram vocab specifically for the test. The test is then invalid as an assessment of your language skills overall. Here’s a case therefore when “teaching to the test” does not make any sense. A more sophisticated test such as WebCAPE is in this case a better placement test: http://webcape.byu.edu/Docs/cover.html Testing is a can of worms – which I found out by working alongside an international team of experts in testing when I was called in by Dialang as a CALL consultant. See the ICT4LT module on Computer Aided Assessment and language learning at: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod4-1.htm

You can find definitions of different types of schools at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/performancetables/k.../glossary.shtml The Specialist Schools Trust has its own website: http://www.specialistschoolstrust.org.uk Independent schools are listed at: www.iscis.uk.net and http://www.indschools.co.uk

Derek writes Exactly my experience at Maidstone Grammar School in the 1950s. Prefects were allowed to beat the kids too. I don't recall anyone setting fire to the dustbins but there was an end-of-year tradition whereby a "stunt" was dreamed up by sixth-form leavers. The stunt was often an act of vandalism and could be costly to repair, e.g. painting "BEER" in 6-foot high letters on the roof, placing a waste-paper basket on top of the school spire, filling condoms with hydrogen gas and letting them loose in the assembly hall (which had a very high ceiling). We had a Combined Cadet Force (CCF), which met on Wednesday afternoons and went off on an annual field day, rather like the field day in "If". We didn't shoot the padre but I have to confess to firing a blank from a 303 Lee Enfield at a prefect's backside (blanks released a piece of wadding which could cause quite a nasty sting). Anyway, the prefect was a swine and throughly deserved it. I managed to convince him that it was an accident.

Adrian writes: I didn't say that national standards were a bad idea, but I have more faith in international standards in my subject area, modern foreign languages. I have often mentioned the Common European Framework (CEF) for Languages. Our EU partners tend to relate their national exams to the CEF yardstick - and some of them have done so for a long time (research on which the CEF was founded goes back many years). We are only just beginning to relate our national exams to the CEF, although exam boards that offer qualifications in ESOL, e.g. Cambridge, took note of the CEF a long time ago - because they are examining people whose qualifications need to be understood all over the world. For language tests that are tied in closely with the CEF levels and which have been designed by an international team see the Dialang project at http://www.dialang.org The problem with our National Curriculum is that it is far too prescriptive. Most of our EU partners have national curricula that are more in the nature of guidelines - and they are more likely to treat teachers as professionals, capable of using the own initiative. John Simkin has raised this issue elsewhere in the Forum, namely how the UK compares with other countries concerning the use of SATs. According to a series of studies conducted by Joanna Le Métais et al. for the National Foundation for Educational Research, it appears that only four countries have compulsory SATs: England, Australia, Canada, Singapore. Only the UK employs league tables to present this information to the public. See: http://www.nfer.ac.uk/ http://www.nfer.ac.uk/research/project_sumtemp.asp?theID=eir The research appears to indicate that there is no link between national testing and educational performance.

Maggie writes: This is not quite true. University examination papers are moderated by external examiners from other universities, and examination scripts produced by the students are scrutinised by external examiners. Right at this moment I am working through a pile of scripts in my role as an external examiner for a British university, and early next week I shall be attending the exam board that awards the final degrees. I am not aware that the university in question awards a high percentage of first class degrees, and this is true of the other three univesities for which I have worked as an external examiner. Standards are pretty much the same across the four universities for which I have worked.

Adrian writes: I left secondary school teaching in 1971, transferring to higher education, where I stayed put until 1993. There have been a LOT of changes since 1971. When I left secondary education in 1971 there were only TWO external examinations that I had to contend with, the O-Level examination and the A-Level examination. There was no National Curriculum and there were no SATS. It was assumed that as professionally trained teachers we knew our subject area and what we should be teaching and testing. There were no bureaucrats breathing down our necks. The government basically took a hands-off approach. The introduction of the National Curriculum and all its accompanying controls in 1988 did nothing to improve standards in my subject area, modern foreign languages. In fact, it was accompanied by a general decline in standards which was obvious to me as a higher education lecturer when I interviewed prospective students of German - in German, of course. Some of them could hardly put a sentence together. Eventually the language departments at my university had to close due to a shortage of suitably qualified new entrants.

In my subject area, modern foreign languages (MFL), examinations are important. We test four discrete skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) rather than stuff that kids can simply regurgitate, i.e. performance is crucial. The problem is that the MFL National Curriculum and the exams associated with it don't appear to be focusing on the skills that children will need later in life, e.g. most employers probably require good listening and speaking skills rather than reading and writing skills. Writing skills in a business context are in any case best carried out by native speakers of the language. To a large extent our national examinations in MFL are of little meaning to employers. I worked on a language training project with a number of different European airlines a few years ago. The training staff of the British airlines that selected new entrants to the profession for specialised language training, e.g. for check-in staff and cabin crew, considered our national examinations to be of little relevance. They therefore set their own language tests. They found that a Higher GCSE qualification, for example, was too low as a starting point for specialised language training and the skills that it had tested were not the skills that the airlines required. Consequently, British airlines tend to employ foreign nationals, e.g. from France, Germany or Spain, who speak English when they need someone with language skills. Leaving aside possible future employers, I have observed countless young Brits with GCSEs in French and German on holiday abroad, struggling to put a couple of sentences together and totally failing to understand the locals. Some years ago I went on a package holiday in an Austrian ski resort. The travel company rep in the resort was a pleasant young woman, aged around 25, who had a BA in Business Studies and German. As a teacher of German, I rated her German at approximately the same level as the English of an Austrian aged 17 studying tourism at a vocational college. Things are beginning to get better. We have finally begun to recognise the Council of Europe's Common European Framework for Languages, which stresses communicative competence across the four skills. See the Languages Ladder at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/DSP_languagesladder.cfm where a Higher GCSE is equated with the CEF level B1. I wonder, however, how many young Brits with a Higher GCSE would actually match up to the CEF level B1, which is the so-called Threshold Level, i.e. the point at which you begin to communicate confidently. I doubt it, frankly. There are online tests available in the three skills listening, reading and writing, which might give the answer: http://www.dialang.org The tests were devised by an international consortium: the DIALANG project.

I seem to type faster than I think these days: "exultations"? I meant "exhortations", of course. Maybe I was thinking of an "exaltation of larks".

This is exactly what my local school uses. They were given a grant to buy the desk-top system by a local business that has branches throughout the world and encourages language learning by making generous grants to education. It was the mainly the timetabling/preparation issues that put a damper on things. I used a kit that cost 40 000 pounds at my university in the old days of multiple ISDN lines. I enjoyed using it but, again, a lot of work went into preparing for each videoconference so that we got the most of of it. I hooked up a webcam to my system at home for a while and joined an online videoconferencing discussion group using NetMeeting. I gave up after a couple of weeks, however, as I was being bombarded by exultations to watch all kinds of interesting things going on in bedrooms around the world. But this may have been due to the way I set up NetMeeting. But once bitten, twice shy. I can only just cope with spam emails.

I probably read more often from the screen these days than I read from books, and I guess this applies to most of the male nerds out there. I tend, however, to read lots of short chunks of text rather than longer texts, say, of five A4 pages or more, which I would print out in order to read them in comfort. I always take a book with me on a train journey or on a long flight. Web guru Jakob Nielsen writes: "Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text." Be Succinct! Writing for the Web, Alertbox for March 15, 1997: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html It was interesting to read the story in The Times (29 November 2000, p. 9) headed King leaves Internet readers in suspense. Stephen King decided not to complete his Internet novel The Plant because - according to King - "it failed to grab the attention of readers on the Web". King found that a surprisingly high proportion of the readers accessing his site (75%-80%) made the "honesty payment" for being allowed to download chapters: "But", he said, "there are a lot fewer of them coming. Online people have the attention span of a grasshopper." The article points out "that digital publishing has a bleak future because it is an unattractive medium for reading long texts and it is difficult to stop breach of copyright". See: http://www.stephenking.com

I have only dabbled in videoconferencing, but I wasn't that impressed. It seems to me that the work involved in preparing for a good videoconference outweighs the benefits. Our local school (Cox Green) experimented with videoconferencing for teaching French. They paired up with a school in France. Here's what the head of modern languages wrote about the experiment: "A great idea, technically feasible especially if you have unlimited money. Did not work for us as the idea of regular one-to-one contact between students met the reality of different (and largely incompatible) school timings and adolescent embarrassment." http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-1.htm Robert O' Dowd has created two websites full of information on videoconferencing and telecollaboration in teaching modern languages: Videoconferencing: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/videoc.html Telecollaboration: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/collab Viedoconferencing has often been a hot topic in the Linguanet Forum. There was a flurry of messages just a short while ago. See the archives: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum Regarding open source products, have you looked at Moodle? It's a VLE: http://moodle.org I don't think videoconferencing is enable within Moodle (yet).

It’s hard to give general advice that applies right across the curriculum. I used to teach modern foreign languages, a subject area which is largely skills-based and where we distinguish four discrete skills for the purposes of assessment, namely: Speaking, Writing, Reading and Listening. In some ways it’s an artificial distinction as there are interrelationships between the skills, e.g. listening skills are known to have a strong influence on speaking skills at the acquisition stage, etc. But in other ways it’s a useful distinction as it can signal, for example, to a future employer what the learner has actually achieved, and there are jobs in which writing is not required but a high degree of competence in listening and speaking is essential. At the same time, the language learner has to acquire a great deal of knowledge: (a) a substantial vocabulary which must be committed to memory (it’s not a good idea to walk around with a dictionary strapped to one’s head) and ( the grammar of the language but, more importantly, how to apply it – and I know of many gifted linguists who can’t explain grammatical rules but can apply them instinctively. I have taught German and French, and I have made efforts to learn Italian, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian. Italian and Spanish came to me quite easily as a speaker of French, because of the huge overlaps in vocab and grammar. Russian was a bit trickier, but it’s in the same broad language family as English (i.e. Indo-European) so many words are immediately recognisable. Hungarian is another matter, because it’s not remotely connected with any of the other languages listed above. Some grammatical concepts are very different but not difficult to grasp once they have been properly explained. It was the vocab that threw me. Hardly any word looks or sounds remotely like words in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian. I made slow progress in learning Hungarian due, as I analyse it, to the difficulty in remembering vocab, i.e. acquiring knowledge. Once essential Hungarian vocab became fixed in my mind everything else slotted into place - but it was a slow process. Are you familiar with the expression "to do the Knowledge"? In order to become a taxi driver in London you have to “do the Knowledge”. Potential cabbies are given a list of routes through London that they must learn by heart. The list, known as The Blue Book, contains 400 routes. As well as learning the 400 routes, the cabbie must learn the location of every hospital, law court, police station, railway station , all tourist locations, etc. There are rigorous tests on the Knowledge that the cabbie has to pass. It takes 2-3 years to do the Knowledge. See: http://knowledge.london-taxi.co.uk ...and, on top of this, there are the essential driving skills that must also be demonstrated.

David writes: This is true of distance learning in general, and the students often feel isolated too. My wife Sally did an Open University degree in the 1970s-1980s. It took her 9 years to complete the 8 modules that she required. This was in the days of radio and TV broadcasts (no Web, no email), and lots of printed materials dropping through one's letterbox every month. We could not afford a VCR, so Sally had to get up at unearthly hours to watch the TV broadcasts. The system worked well because there was regular telephone contact with tutors, regular meetings with tutors and other students at local schools and colleges, regular assessment, a one-week summer school each year (where OU students could experience what it felt like to be at a "real" university) - but, above all, because the materials were well designed and aimed at students working on their own. These valuable lessons appear to have been forgotten by some of the institutions that are rushing headlong into what they call e-learning - as David says: The same applies to online training. The NOF initiative in the UK was to a large extent a failure. The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) produced a report on the NOF initiative in April 2002: ICT in schools: effect of government initiatives. The report makes important observations on the use of ICT in schools, including a number of successful case studies, but it is generally critical of the NOF training initiative: "Training funded by the NOF has been effective in a quarter of secondary departments and a third of primary schools. In around six out of every ten secondary departments and half the primaries, the scheme has so far failed to build on teachers’ ICT skills or enable them to tackle pedagogical issues adequately. In a minority of schools, the scheme has acted as a catalyst for improvement." (p.22) "Many teachers have found online support to be unsatisfactory. This was usually because access was unreliable or because mentors were dealing with too many teachers and their responses were therefore often infrequent, shallow or unhelpful. Successful online mentoring operated at ratios of under 30 teachers to each mentor." (p. 23) "Some providers experienced major problems with their online systems to such an extent that teachers became frustrated by repeated failure to access their websites. Teachers who were left to their own devices to use distance learning materials on CD-ROM frequently made little headway and did not complete the training." (p. 24) OFSTED (2002) ICT in schools: effect of government initiatives, Report, April 2002. See the OFSTED website, http://www.ofsted.gov.uk, where the report can be downloaded in PDF format: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/docs/19.pdf

How about Moodle? It's a free open source Virtual Learning Environment: http://moodle.org

Maggie writes: Yes, they do – and some accountants adopt a similar practice. At one time my business used a firm of accountants that appeared to be timing everything with a stopwatch, including every phone call that they made to me or that I made to them. The phone calls were itemised, along with everything else, in my annual bill. I finally sacked them, however, mainly because they became very lax in presenting my accounts to the local tax office, but what really annoyed me was that they itemised all the phone calls that I made to them asking why they hadn’t presented my accounts! Needless to say, I refused to pay for this. Regarding the points that David makes, his institution seems to have tied things up quite nicely. There are many educational institutions, however, that simply perceive e-learning as a cheap option, failing to take proper account of tutors’ time and the new skills that they need to acquire. If e-learning is properly costed then it is not necessarily a cheap option and there is no economy of scale, i.e. it doesn’t get cheaper as the numbers of students increase – because a tutor can only deal with a certain number of students at one time. A maximum of 30 students per tutor has often been quoted as a desirable figure to aim at.

Here's a good one: "The Independent Education Union and the National Tertiary Education Union have made the first industrial claims over so-called email stress. The former is pursuing a pay claim as compensation for the strains of new technology. The latter is seeking provision for casual tutors to be paid for answering students' emails." http://www.ieu.asn.au/news/general/1036473822_27358.html I don't think it's unreasonable to charge for dealing with emails. I have worked as a consultant to several educational institutions, assisting them to manage EC-funded projects. I made it quite clear from the outset that I would be submitting a monthly worklog and that I would log 15 minutes for dealing with each email that was sent to me. 15 minutes was a good average figure. Most emails just had to be filed for reference but others may have needed an hour's research. It made the project management teams think carefully about sending me irrelevant emails. See also: "Email is top cause of workplace stress" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/16/email_is_top_cause/ "Emails adding to workplace stress" http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/...l?from=storyrhs "For those who can't remember working life before email, beware: psychologists warn the technology is now a key cause of job-related stress." http://www.careerone.com.au/resources/stor...0-22549,00.html

John writes: I am not sure that they are dominating the creation of online materials, certainly not in my subject area, modern foreign languages. Female teachers have always been in the majority in my subject area since I started teaching in the 1960s, and they are making a major contribution to the development of online resources and ICT training for language teachers. For example, there are many excellent websites created and maintained predominantly by women, e.g. 1. MFL Resources: A large set of free downloadable resources for teachers of Modern Foreign Languages. Mainly geared to secondary education: http://www.mflresources.org.uk 2. The Language Investigator: This site is aimed mainly at primary school teachers who are interested introducing a multilingual dimension into their lessons, but the materials are relevant to teachers and pupils in secondary education too. The work is a result of a one-year project called Thinking through Languages which was developed within a group of Coventry primary schools. The project was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. An excellent site for raising awareness about languages, with lots of useful links: http://www.language-investigator.co.uk/index.htm As for leading the way in e-Learning, the head of the e-Learning Strategy Unit at the DfES is a woman, Diana Laurillard - with whom I have had the pleasure of working on a number of occasions: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy

I remember one real monster of a maths teacher who taught at the grammar school which I attended from 11 to 18. His nickname was "Tarzan". He was a Welshman, formerly a coalminer and built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse. He would throw the blackboard eraser with amazing accuracy at inattentive pupils and would whack pupils who misbehaved with a gym plimsoll - right in front of the class. He got good exam results, though. Then there was "Gladys", a buxom lady with a stentorian voice who taught maths at a school where I taught German and French. She used to put the fear of God into her pupils, including boys over six foot tall who were members of the first 15 rugby team. She was very patient, however, with pupils who genuinely did not understand a maths concept and would spend a lot of time with them after school hours. Gladys got amazing exam results. Tarzan was not the most feared teacher at my grammar school. This distinction went unquestionably to the head of Latin, who was nicknamed "Ichabod" (Hebrew for "the glory has departed"). Hardly anybody in Ichabod's Latin sets failed O Level Latin. Ichabod was, however, a good teacher. He knew his stuff, accepted no excuses for not handing in homework, corrected all our written work conscientiously and quickly and would spend time with pupils who were genuinely struggling. As a former secondary school teacher of German and French, I find it hard to judge if I was "evil". I probably was. I was very intolerant of written inaccuracy and would make kids correct every mistake they made and produce a fair copy of their corrected work. It got results. I guess maths, languages and science are singled out as "worst taught" because they are also perceived as "difficult" subjects. I note that the BBC survey lists art, PE and English as the most popular subjects.

As I indicated in an earlier email, one should look ahead and think positively. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/musiclive/ "For eleven days Northern Ireland becomes the music capital of the world. Northern Ireland is to be the stage for a great line-up of top-flight musicians and performers, playing live to an audience of millions throughout the UK and beyond when it hosts the BBC's acclaimed live music festival - Music Live."

For further information on email projects, especially in the context of learning foreign languages, see Section 14 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm