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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2019
Categories |