12/1/2018 0 Comments Turns out nobody failed after allLast night, the following statement was put out by the Fiji Ministry of Education:
The Minister for Education, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum has apologized to teachers and parents of students for the recent statement given to the media by the Permanent Secretary of Education, Iowane Tiko regarding the results of an English Proficiency test taken by teaching applicants. Sayed-Khaiyum says the statement is incorrect and the test was not administered on the basis of pass or fail. He says the main purpose of the assessment was to provide a benchmark data to help measure the effectiveness of professional development programmes that will be carried out throughout the year. On the face of it, this is a welcome U-turn (although perhaps not welcomed by those who will inevitably be blamed for having to do it quite so publicly). A pass/fail binary runs the risk of insufficient applicants being eligible to fill the posts that do need to be filled, which is what has clearly happened after the first round of testing. However, a scaled approach that essentially allows the top candidates to be selected until all posts are filled enables the Ministry to manage the situation rather more smoothly, even if they initially fill some posts with weaker candidates than is desirable. They can work out what to do to improve the situation over time, rather than trying to come up with a quick-fix solution. It is unclear yet quite how much of a U-turn this really is though. More detailed articles this morning in the various media outlets provide two further insights. Firstly, we learn that only teachers who met the baseline proficiency requirements have been appointed to teaching positions in Term 1. So, although the stance has softened and the remaining teachers haven’t actually “failed” anything, the Ministry hasn’t yet retracted its initial decision that fifty per cent of applicants for teaching vacancies have been deemed ineligible for these posts on the grounds of weak English proficiency. For the baseline approach to work, the Ministry will have to go one step further, recall all test results, admit to a huge blunder, and start again with the allocation of posts. Secondly, we read that one of the main purposes of the assessment is to provide benchmark data to help measure the effectiveness of professional development programs that will be carried out throughout the year. Reading between the lines here, it appears that appointments will be made (as they have to be because we need teachers in classrooms), and then professional development training will be put in place in order to raise proficiency levels of the teachers on the job. Depending on the type of training envisaged, this may be a good strategy to provide some further English courses for teachers. However, a high-stakes system of test-training-retest is unlikely to be of much value, because the training will focus too much on test taking strategies and decontextualised grammar knowledge that may get teachers through the test but leave them unable to USE English any more effectively. (Many teachers on social media have commented that this has been the problem with the school English syllabus that has led to this problem in the first place.) More importantly, until we know far more about the extent to which it is possible to raise the proficiency of second language users of English at this stage in their educational careers - when they have already been operating through English for 12-13 years of formal schooling - we should be very cautious about further promises that are made.
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It’s not entirely clear why anyone is surprised today by poor results on a test that was implemented in response to the concern that English proficiency of Fiji’s teachers was weak. Indeed, as the Permanent Secretary is quoted as saying a few lines below the headline of English test shock, “It proves what we have suspected all along”.
What is slightly more of a surprise is that the Ministry didn’t think this through. It set a pre-determined pass mark, with a pre-determined consequence (fail and you can’t come in), without having a back-up plan in place to help fill the positions that would inevitably be left vacant, and even serving teachers may now need to pass the test in order to keep their jobs. Well, there is a back-up plan that you can try again this Saturday, but you will then need to think about a different career if you fail for the second time. If teachers do markedly better on the re-test, one week later and with no interim support, it will suggest that they either failed the first test due to lack of familiarity with the testing format (rendering the test invalid), or passed the re-test due to circumstances that altered the odds somehow - such as an exact repeat of the same test items, or an easier version of the test. It would have been more sensible to use a band score system (such as IELTS in which you can score between Band 1 and Band 9 in each skill, but you cannot fail, leaving institutions such as universities and immigration authorities free to determine which bands make the cut). With this type of system, the Ministry of Education could have ascertained the extent of the issue before making rash decisions, excluded those scoring the really low bands, and then put together a strategy for ensuring that they wouldn’t have to keep accepting those with lower-than-desirable bands in the medium to long term. As it is, they’ve slightly shot themselves in the foot, because they’ve announced to the nation (and the region at large, who still seem to look up to Fiji as the beacon of educational progress, if many comments on social media are to be believed) that approximately 50% of new teaching posts will not be filled unless enough candidates pass the second time. What are they going to do if they don’t? Leave the classrooms understaffed or go back on their word and let the teachers in anyway? Meanwhile, none of us really know what ‘failure’ means on this particular test, so the general public is not necessarily any the wiser now than we were when the media was merely reporting that standards were falling. We know nothing about the predictive validity of the test - i.e. whether an ability to do well on the test items translates into an ability to teach English well. This does not necessarily refute the general impressions reported about the recent test. It’s just that these media reports remain just that - general impressions that reinforce what we were fairly sure we knew already. The Fiji Ministry of Education has recently implemented a ‘work test’ as part of its recruitment process for new teachers. With apparently very little notice, applicants were required to attend a test centre on 2 January to sit a literacy test followed by an assessment relating to the relevant job descriptions. This is intended to enable the Ministry to make job offers by 8 January, so that all teachers can be at their schools two days later, as per the recent order that all teachers be in place a week before the students turn up. Early reports stated that there were “more than 1000” test applicants for 1235 posts. If these numbers are to be believed, either the test is uncompetitive and all or most applicants will be offered a post regardless of results, or a number of posts will be left vacant, assuming that some applicants will fail a more competitive assessment.
Neither outcome is desirable, but the scenario illustrates a longstanding dilemma: If so many teachers are considered to have low English proficiency that a test is deemed necessary in order to keep some of them from the classrooms, we know perfectly well that the majority are not going to achieve a high outcome on such a test. In other words, a test is merely going to reveal the extent of the problem. When the initiative was first announced in October 2015, as part of a new set of reforms to enhance teaching, it was stated that: “From 2016, all non-English subject teachers in all our High Schools will be required to undertake online training on Basic English proficiency and sit for a diagnostic test. This test is a diagnostic tool to ensure competency of teachers in both oral and written English. The idea here is for all subject teachers to also check student submissions for proper English.” Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that English teachers would be exempt from the need to display high levels of English proficiency, the issue here is that a test is being referred to as a “diagnostic tool to ensure competency of teachers”. If it is indeed a diagnostic tool, then it is surely diagnosing the specific needs of the applicants, and is not doing anything to ensure that teachers actually ARE competent. No mention has yet been made of what the Ministry of Education plans to do once it has made its diagnosis. Will weak applicants be turned away from the profession, or will they be employed and expected to do something to improve their English on the job? At the root of the matter is a much deeper concern with appropriate timing and type of a language assessment. As a correspondent to the Fiji Sun noted on 3 January, “Assuming teacher training is sound and incompetent students have been weeded out, why is another Government test required? … These matters must worry not just new graduates but those who’ve prepared them.” However, teacher training institutions constantly ask the same question. If they are to prevent applicants with insufficient English proficiency from entering their teacher training programmes, what does this say about the school system that has produced them? Where do we draw the line and say that someone must be prevented from reaching the next level? I applaud the Fiji Ministry of Education’s decision to take the issue of English proficiency of its teachers seriously, but I hope this will be part of a much bigger attempt to tackle the issue. To break the cycle of weak English proficiency, we need an overhaul of the way English is taught in schools, and we need proficient users of the language to be incentivised to enter teacher training programmes. Applicants should be tested on the way into teacher training programmes, not on the way out, and only competent English speakers should be accepted. If teacher training programmes must spend their time teaching teachers to speak English, there won’t be any time to actually train them to teach. At which point, we might as well save ourselves the trouble and just recruit unskilled volunteers and backpackers from Australia and New Zealand who already speak English fluently, and post them directly into the nation’s schools. |
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