Talking shop: professional standards in ELT

Talking shop: professional standards in ELT

Hedge: In 1992 ELT Journal published an open letter to the ELT profession from Alan Maley, in which he made the point that as a profession we have to be able to show that we can deliver what we claim through a measure of evaluative control. I know, Chris, that you have been involved in a number of different bodies that are concerned with quality control in the UK context, and I wonder if you would like to give some background about the rise of such bodies, and what you see as their primary function? Quality control in teacher education

Brumfit: I think the issue of quality control has to be seen in the context of a substantial shift in attitudes towards education, and particularly higher education, in the last fifteen to twenty years. It used to be assumed that you appointed the people that you thought were the right people for the job and you let them get on with it. Increasingly, as market forces have come to play a much larger role in higher education, institutions have been competing with each other for students, and consequently there have been pressures to find students—almost at any cost. When that happens it becomes important that you should have mechanisms for preventing standards from dropping. You can't rely—if you ever could—on elite assumptions that you have got people who are honest and have high standards and that they themselves will determine what the standards are. So in recent years there has been substantial pressure to produce bodies that can satisfactorily put these mechanisms in place. It is also the case, of course, that ELT, as a direct teaching profession, has always been subject to market forces, and has always had a fair degree of organization to establish evaluative control of the kind that Alan Maley was talking about. ARELS, the Association of Recognised English Language Schools, for example, has for many years been a source of standards maintenance in direct language teaching.

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Recent years have seen the development of a number of professional organizations in the UK which have an interest in quality assurance, and are in the process of setting up or have already established procedures for the evaluation and accreditation of courses. They have emerged as a response to national concerns, but also reflect an increasing world-wide interest in professional standards in ELT. Christopher Brumfit, Professor of Education at the University of Southampton, and Hywel Coleman from the School of Education, University of Leeds, are both active members of one such body, and here they reflect on issues inherent in quality control at a national level.

It's slightly different when you come to teacher education, because traditionally teacher education has been fairly closely associated with governments and hasn't, until very recently, operated in the free market. Now, because private sector and public sector institutions are in competition with each other in a free market, there is a much stronger case for bodies of this kind. There are at the moment, in fact, at least three bodies in higher education who have some role to play in this—that is, the older British universities have the Institute for English Language Teaching Development in Higher Education (IELTDHE), and other higher educational institutions have BASCELT, which is the British Association of State Colleges in English Language Teaching.

Brumht: BATQI is the British Association of Teacher Qualifying Institutions in the field of TESOL, and is a body with a constitution, elected representatives, and an executive committee, which is attempting to bring together all institutions, whether public or private sector, who produce courses in the training and education of ELT teachers. Its main function is to raise professionalism in the field, establish that there are mechanisms for quality control, that its members are maintaining high standards, and guarantee participants on their courses the highest standard of professional involvement appropriate to the level of course and qualification that they are working towards. Hedge: If we take BATQI as an example of an organization seeking to maintain professional standards, how was it generated in the first place? What brought institutions together to set it up? Was it a sort of grassroots movement among them to exchange ideas about quality control and find a common accreditation system? Or were there external forces at work in persuading people that it was a necessary and desirable thing to set up? External forces

Brumfit: I think it was a combination of both. The atmosphere I have just described, of market 'push', did encourage institutions to find a way of representing themselves and assuring clients of quality. There was also a concern about Britain's close involvement with the EU and what the implications would be of teachers and student teachers transferring in and out of European countries. And there was concern, too, about the quality of provision by British institutions to governments outside the European community in the field of teacher education. There had been some complaints from overseas governments on some occasions, and this added to the concern in higher education for quality control. So external push certainly helped, but I think it was a combination of both those types of force. Coleman: Yes, in terms of concern within institutions, I think it coincided in particular with the arrival on the scene of several new teacher development programmes in ELT in the UK, and I think there was some anxiety about the equivalence of the courses being prepared. So I see Talking shop: professional standards in EL T

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Hedge: And, at the moment, you are Chair of BATQI, which is specifically to do with teacher education courses, isn't it?

that as one of the main factors leading to the establishment of B A T Q I . Hedge: What you say seems to suggest that institutions have autonomy in setting up courses and that it is quite difficult to find equivalence among courses. D o you think this situation is going to get easier over the years? I am reminded of something I heard the manager of an institution say recently: 'We have our own standards.' H e seemed to imply that he didn't want to have anything to do with externally imposed standards. What would your response be to that manager?

Hedge: Of course, the view has been expressed that such professional bodies might restrict the marketing and recruitment activities of institutions. Brumfit: Yes, there is certainly a view that bodies which attempt to maintain standards represent some kind of cartel that is trying to exclude innovating outsiders. There is also a view that as long as people come into education they are paying fees, and why should anybody restrict the activity of institutions trying to get students who pay? It seems to me that there's a very easy answer to this, which is that education is not actually like buying soap powders or fruit, in which case, if you don't like what you get one day you can get something else the next. If you have a bad experience on a course in education you don't go back and d o the same kind of course again in a better place; you've actually burnt your fingers and you are going to go around suffering, and you may in fact not go back to education at all. Education is very different from many of the commodities in which a free market can satisfactorily operate. What is absolutely crucial is that there is some way of ensuring that if somebody advertises a course of a particular kind, people who come on that course are genuinely getting a course of that kind, and not a shoddy product. Coleman: There are valuable spin-offs, too, in setting up mechanisms for evaluating courses. I am thinking about the way in which m e m b e r institutions might be facilitated in finding out more about each other's evaluation procedures and frameworks and in reflecting on their own. T h e r e are rich opportunities for professionals who are working in different sectors to talk to each other and discover each other's practices. Evaluation procedures

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Hedge: Does this have implications for the kind of evaluation procedures that you have developed, and whether you involve people in visiting each other in peer evaluation among institutions? Have you debated the pros and cons of different types of evaluation processes? Chris, you've got an interesting scheme within your own university, haven't you? Christopher Brumfit and Hywel Coleman


Coleman: It seems to be that organizations of the kind we have just discussed play two roles. Firstly, to facilitate general understanding of the relationship between different types of qualification. For example, what do the qualifications 'certificate' and 'diploma' mean? Secondly, and closely related to that, to ensure that courses which lead to qualification meet reasonable standards.

Evaluation criteria

Hedge: Given the diversity that you have just talked about, how have you tried to move towards a framework of evaluation criteria that might apply to a number of different organizations? What would you see as the really important criteria that you would want a course, or a department running teacher education courses to conform to, to be able to fulfil? Brumfit: I would want to say broadly that an institution has got to have staff who have appropriate experience and qualifications; that it has got to be offering something which relates to the identified needs of the participants who are coming in to particular courses or activities; and it's got to have procedures for monitoring what it's doing and for constantly enabling staff to see whether they are achieving their objectives. What I am not absolutely sure about, is whether there is clear way in which you can demonstrate to a sceptical outsider, who doesn't believe in something in the first place, that it is having an absolutely undeniable and irreversible beneficial effect on the profession. It seems to me there are quite a lot of activities that aren't of that kind. We don't want to say that nobody should study literature because you can't demonstrate that wars stop because people have been humanized by the study of literature, and I think there is some element in any teacher education activity where you are trying to develop something which ultimately is moral and valuable to you, and very difficult to pin down to performance indicators, particularly of a quantitative kind. Coieman: I would want to add that I think procedure is very important, particularly openness. So that means ensuring that procedures relating Talking shop: professional standards in ELT

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Brumfit: Yes, actually, it has been effective partly because of its combination of external evaluation and local evaluation by people who are not in the department being evaluated, combined with the process of internal evaluation by the department itself. That is to say, a department prepares its own self-evaluation along guidelines which are laid down by the university. These are then subject to scrutiny by a team consisting of members of the department, members of other departments, members of other faculties, and one representative of that particular academic field from right outside the university altogether. And they produce a combined report, which then goes to a committee and is discussed in some detail. I think the combination of internal procedures by people who understand pretty fully the specific needs of a particular group, with some degree of external accountability, is a good combination. I think it does require a specific statement of what it is that anybody working in a particular field is doing. The English teaching profession is still very diverse, and very divided, so that getting an agenda for evaluation that we can agree on is actually a long and slow process. I think it will be fair to say that the association we have been talking about just now, BATQI, has been moving very, very gradually towards getting the trust of its members and of other groups within the profession, in order to ensure that it doesn't try to bounce people into something which looks as if it is being highly selective, in the interests of a small group. It's always a political activity, evaluation—it's never exclusively an academic activity.

to the recruitment and teaching of students, the establishment of teaching objectives, the examination of students, the criteria employed for awarding the qualifications, and so on, that all these procedures are accountable. Hedge: So you are talking about the creation of a climate, in which students as participants, or teachers as participants on courses, feel that they are empowered to share information, to have a voice in their own programmes, to evaluate their own programmes, and to try to improve and refine on things.

Evaluation as awareness-raising

Coleman: Yes, I was able to gain some insights when I was a member of the Professional Standards Committee of TESOL. I was interested to see the procedures they have been developing. The Committee has established several sets of standards for different types of programmes—language programmes, teacher development programmes, and most recently programmes for English as an international language. The procedures which they have been encouraging are that individual institutions should agree to adopt standards appropriate for their particular courses and then go through a process, called self-study, in which all teaching and administrative members of that institution will examine, in practice, and collegiately, all their activities, and evaluate them minutely in relationship to a set of standards. At the end of the process, which may take up to a year, or longer, a report on that process will be published and made available. So this is clearly a rigorous—or at least, potentially—a rigorous awareness-raising exercise, and demands great co-operation between the people involved, and a lot of honesty as well. Hedge: Is the report then subject to outsider scrutiny of some kind? Coleman: It's not subject to outsider scrutiny in the same way as Chris just described for his own university, or in the way BATQI has been considering. It's made available to TESOL and ultimately to other institutions. It's an awareness-raising process. Brumfit: And that is not to say that awareness was lacking before. I think perhaps it's dangerous for people to assume that this is something completely new. I think that for a very long time there has been a view that good teachers and good teacher educators are monitoring their own performance, are being explicit about what it is they are trying to do, are talking with colleagues in an accountable way about the processes that they use, and are willing to exchange experiences with people outside the profession, to try to benefit from them. It is the managerial structure and framework that is really new and that, to some extent, has been pushed from outside forces.

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Christopher Brumfit and Hywel Coleman


Brumfit: In that sense it's an international issue, one where we can use the experience of people working in other parts of the world who work in similar areas.

Hedge: We've talked about benefits to institutions, to the profession, and to participants on courses. What about teachers? What value do you think professional organizations like BATQI and the others you've mentioned have for teachers.? Benefits to teachers

Coleman: I think that they probably have value in at least two distinct ways. Firstly, if teachers are working in institutions which are participating in this sort of process of awareness-raising about quality of service, that will lead to an increased sense of awareness in the individual teachers who are working on those programmes. At the same time, if the qualifications to which teachers are teaching are seen to be part of a framework which is understandable to the whole profession, I think that leads to an increased sense of professionalism as well. And the way in which qualifications relate to each other is very important. I receive an increasing number of enquiries from people who want to know about the value of a particular teaching qualification—whether it's worth pursuing a course which is going to give them a specific qualification. At the moment it is very very difficult to answer that, and in any case, I wouldn't want to talk about a specific course and qualification. But the point is that people in our profession do not find it easy to work out a career plan. I think there is a real need in the profession for some mechanism or procedure which will help people to understand more clearly how one qualification relates to another.

Flexibility of evaluation criteria

Hedge: The UK bodies that you've mentioned have all set up or are in the process of setting up accreditation schemes through which the quality of courses can be assessed. Any potential applicant for a course can check to see if it has been accredited by a professional body. But it must be a far from easy process to decide on the criteria you are going to apply in any evaluation, especially when there are so many institutions and courses involved. I've seen documents, for example, which list criteria Talking shop: professional standards in ELT

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And of course, it brings some dangers, if you set up a system or a set of procedures for evaluation and accreditation of courses which all institutions are ideally meant to adopt. For each performance indicator you produce, against which to assess a course, it's possible to find a negative result arising from imposing it. For example, if you say that we want to measure the quality of a course by the large number of distinctions gained by students in their coursework or examinations, you put pressure on staff to award more distinctions. Similarly, if you say you want to measure quality by the high standard of students who enter the course, you have pressure to refuse all students who haven't got a high standard of prior qualification, and consequently a large number of people who could benefit from the course won't be allowed on to it. So, whatever kind of measure you set up, there's always a risk that you will generate a negative side-effect. I think part of the job of organizations such as BATQI is to try to find the most successful way of helping the whole profession, not just a small part of it, to achieve its goals most satisfactorily in relation to the largest number and range of possible participants.

such as academic management, qualifications of staff, and whether or not there are internal procedures for getting feedback from students, but also points like provision for student counselling, accommodation, and so on. In deciding what makes for quality, how do you negotiate the process of setting up criteria among institutions? Is there room within an accreditation scheme for negotiation by individual member institutions to adjust some kind of framework or set of criteria to the needs of their own courses, or do you think there are dangers of lack of rigour in that approach?

Hedge: At the moment, B A T Q I is a UK-based organization but, clearly, with increased mobility within the E U , the issue of equivalent qualifications for English language teachers will take on more significance. Is it part of B A T Q I ' s thinking that it would be useful to move into E u r o p e ? Brumfit: It seems to me that the British have got to get their own house in order first and have a fair degree of agreement before they start suggesting that they have a model to offer other people. It may well be that getting the British house in reasonable order is a prerequisite for talking with E u r o p e a n bureaucrats who are already concerned to establish equivalencies across countries. Y o u can't d o that, though, if everybody is uncertain about who is working in what direction, with different qualifications, and there's no real agreement. Issues accreditation

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Hedge: Hywel was talking about the problem of setting up criteria which apply across a wide range of contexts. What other issues have you encountered in setting up an accreditation system, given that you are working towards enabling people to see equivalence among courses? Brumfit: I think we've first got a problem of gaining trust, and a second problem of gaining authority. I think probably they have to go in that order. You've got to have trust because people will not be frank with an organization which they feel is likely to kick them in the teeth if they tell the truth about what their view of their own experience is. Y o u ' v e got to feel that all institutions are treated in the same way, and not that some are privileged. But if you're going to have authority, the association has also got to cover enough institutions for outsiders to believe it reflects the profession as a whole, and is not just the representative of some small regional group, or some specific types of institution, or anything else of that kind. So working towards those two is actually, I think, a

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Coleman: I think, probably, yes to both parts of your question. For any scheme to be realistic there has to be an element of negotiation. At the same time, you have to ensure when building-in that flexibility that the scheme is not laying itself open to abuse. I observed a parallel problem on the T E S O L scheme, where the Core Standards Committee struggled with the issue of how you prepare a set of course standards which can, in some way, be internationally applicable, applicable across states. It is a major problem to set up standards which avoid being bland but are not overly influenced by the values in one particular control area.

long and slow process which involves close contact with individuals from different sources with conflicting interests, having people who are prepared to sit with each other long enough for them to understand the various difficulties that they have. Hedge: Presumably it means bringing together people who have conflicting political interests within the profession? Brumfit: There may be a genuine conflict between the need for trust and the marketing and competitive setting which people are now working in.

Brumfit: I think that there is inevitably a tension among member institutions in an association like BATQI, which represents probably the widest cross-section of TESOL qualifying institutions in the UK in any one organizations. However, I think there's a widespread desire that we need a body to reflect British ELT in discussions with government bodies, funding organizations, and in relation to international marketing. It's not entirely clear, though, that there is complete trust in all sectors towards the notion that there should be a single body. I think there's always an element of distrust unless people talk to each other over a long period of time and can put all their cards on the table and be frank with each other. Hedge: How do you create that trust? What are the concrete things that you can do? Creating trust

Coleman: It goes back to what I was saying earlier about professionals who are working in different areas having the opportunity to talk to each other and find out about each others intentions and practices. An example of this is the conference we're currently organizing about the ELT Diploma. A wide range of courses with different aims, participants, and outcomes are called diploma courses. We want to bring together people from private language schools, colleges, and universities, as well as other institutions... all of whom are offering courses which lead to something which is called a diploma. Those diplomas are very different in nature, but I am confident that the conference will provide a unique opportunity which has not existed before, for people from these different sectors to learn about each other's practices in this field. That's one way of creating understanding. I think another way is through inviting organizations to talk to each other occasionally. BATQI has had a lot of support from its Advisory Council. This is a body which brings together more than a dozen organizations that have a significant interest in teacher development in ELT in the UK, organizations such as the British Council, IATEFL, UCLES, ARELS, Trinity College London, and so on. From time to time we invite Talking shop: professional standards in ELT

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Coleman: In our experience, have we actually come across that? Or have we found that there's been a general consensus that what we are working towards is something that would benefit everybody? My perception is that the profession has been extremely supportive of the work of BATQI.

representatives of the organizations to come together, to scrutinize the work that we are doing and advise us on perspectives, issues, etc. Gaining authority

Brumfit: And in terms of gaining authority, I think that comes with time. It's not always possible to judge how that's going to operate. Clearly it's dependent on honesty, on the clear perception that justice is being done.

What I am sure about is that unless you are able to support your marketing with the authority of knowing that people will get a guaranteed product of some kind, which does what it says, and doesn't fall below certain stated standards, you would not actually be able to look yourself in the face and say 'I am an honest commercial enterprise', let alone honest in any of the other terms that are important. It's absolutely essential that people who operate in educational settings give people what they claim they are going to give. No more and no less. Unity and diversity

Hedge: You've talked again about the tension that you mentioned earlier, and the fact that it is very difficult to bring people together, and I wonder whether, in fact, it will ever be possible to create some kind of unified group nationally, which might be perceived by many people as the ideal. However, it is possible to question that ideal: I think a lot of people might say that there is value in diversity, and that it might be better to have a number of smaller organizations, with slightly different interests. Brumfit: It's not clear to me that, at any time in history, places that have valued diversity at the expense of everything else, have ended up with anything except warfare! It seems to me that you've always got an apparent conflict between quality and freedom, and that ultimately each individual in each institution, and each institution in each society, has to work out for itself how best to maintain a high degree of quality. This means compromising what people would actually like to do in certain respects, while maintaining the degree of diversity necessary to enrich the profession, or create imaginative alternatives, or do all these other things. But I don't think quality and diversity are actually in conflict with each other. It's possible to have many, many different ways of doing things extremely well. What you can't have is people appealing to diversity as a reason for not bothering to do things extremely well. November 1993

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Ultimately, I think it is also dependent on there being a large enough body of people who wish to know about the work of an association and hear about the characteristics of its members. And it may be, therefore that, in those circumstances, there is a closer relationship necessary between marketing bodies and the role of bodies like BATQI and BASCELT and IELTDHE—all of which would claim to have some degree of impartiality in their relationships with their members. I think there is a potential conflict, which is very difficult to avoid, because the process of marketing requires you to have some notion that you are getting a market, whether national or international, in competition with somebody else.