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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