Category: Community College

Australia’s Largest Provider of Education and Training
Uses Versant English Placement Test

Posted on | by Pearson

Navitas is a leading global education provider that offers an extensive range of educational services to students and professionals, including university programs, creative-media education, professional education, English language training, and settlement services. University Programs is the largest division of Navitas; it prepares international and domestic students for tertiary study through pre-university and university pathway programs. The following case study will describe the challenges and solutions for administering English assessments for over 10,000 university students from 80 countries each year.

“Testing More Than 10,000 Students Annually is a Massive Undertaking”

Navitas had been assessing the English language skills of students seeking an education in an English-speaking country for many years using a customized test. Not only was the test laborious to administer and difficult to scale, but it also lacked the credibility of a third party marking, managing and moderating results. Navitas needed an objective test to satisfy both university partners and parents.

Navitas turned to Pearson to help create an online test that would meet the highest level of excellence for English language testing. When Pearson launched the Versant™ English Placement Test (VEPT) with Navitas in 2011, it was the first globally validated test that assessed the four modalities of English: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Continue reading →

Did You Miss Our Professional Development Series?

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If you missed our two weeks of Professional Development Webinars, no worries. We have recorded every session for your convenience. Just register and login in to watch practical and informative sessions given by experts in the field of English language teaching including Dr. Ken Beatty, Carol Numrich, Christina Cavage, Sarah Lynn, and Tania Pattison just to name a few. Topics ranged from the flipped classroom and teaching with technology to critical thinking and English for academic purposes. Click here to get started!

G is for Games

Posted on | by Pearson

Ken BeattyDr. Ken Beatty

“Why are they playing games and not learning something?”

Games are among the most misunderstood pedagogical strategies in the teachers’ toolbox. Parents, other teachers, and administrators can misinterpret students’ enjoyment of games as having fun at the expense of more serious and productive learning. But the opposite is often the case; the casual competitive nature of games suppresses students’ self-consciousness and helps them focus and learn more than during other classroom activities.

However, to be fair, sometimes teachers play games in the classroom without a perfect understanding of the benefits that games carry and the ways in which they can be tailored to better address student needs. In such cases, teachers may only use games as filler activities, as a way of keeping more able students busy while others catch up. Alternatively, games might only be used at the end of a class when there is extra time left.

Motivation

Because games are inherently motivating, they are useful as a reward or a break from other classroom activities. Some games add excitement, such as kinesthetic ones that require students to stand up and participate as a group. An example is Simon Says, in which students have to listen carefully and follow a leader’s directions as long as they are prefaced with the words, “Simon says (touch your nose).” If the words Simon says aren’t said by the leader, students have to remain stationary or find themselves out of the game.

The pedagogical purposes of Simon Says–type games are usually to encourage discrete listening and also to reinforce language students have already learned around actions related to identifying body parts (touch your knees), types of motion (shake your head; close your eyes), and actions (sit down; stand up). As with most games, there are opportunities to tailor the game to the target vocabulary students have recently covered. Reinforcement through a game is important because it stores the information in another part of the brain. Beyond reading, writing, listening, or speaking, the kinesthetic aspect helps make the vocabulary more memorable. Continue reading →

Towards the Critique: Teaching EAP Students to Be Critical

Posted on | by Pearson

Tania Pattison PhotoTania Pattison

For EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers, it may not be enough these days to teach standard essays and research skills. In order to prepare students adequately for their future studies, EAP teachers at CEFR levels B2 and above need to go further. Recent corpora-based research has shed new light on the genres of writing that our students should expect to encounter in their future studies; for example, in research carried out in the UK, Nesi and Gardner (2012) identified 13 genres that undergraduates could be expected to write; these include essay, case study, narrative recount, and more. One that is common across the disciplines is the critique.

What is a critique?
As Nesi and Gardner put it, “The central purpose of Critiques is to demonstrate and develop understanding of the object of study and the ability to evaluate and/or assess its significance” (2012, p. 94). This could take several forms; depending on their field of study, students may be asked to review books, articles, films, plays, and works of art; they could be asked to evaluate financial data, legislation, government policy, and business operations, or they could be required to analyze critically the results of an experiment, a process, or a system (Nesi & Gardner, 2012). In other words, understanding is not enough; students need to use their critical thinking skills to respond to something they are studying and to express a judgment about its value or usefulness. In the EAP class, the item being subjected to critical analysis is usually a written text.

Learning to be critical
Most EAP students, I have found, are not really clear about what being critical actually entails; many think it has something to do with being negative, and it comes as a bit of a surprise when I tell them that while the word critical often does suggest a negative reaction, critical analysis does not necessarily involve looking for problems within the text. I like to draw students’ attention to people who work as critics of movies, music, restaurants, and so on; these people write reviews that may be positive, negative, or a little of both.

Another thing worth emphasizing to students is that a critique is not an emotional response. Students may be predisposed to disagree with any text that goes against their own personal beliefs, which may have their basis in religion or politics. It is important to emphasize the need to look objectively at the author’s argument and to come to a reasoned analysis, not an emotional outburst. Continue reading →

Maximum Benefit, Minimal Prep:
A Quick Song-Based Lesson

Posted on | by Pearson

2013_Heyer_SandraSandra Heyer

Song lyrics are sometimes difficult for English language learners to comprehend; in fact, some song lyrics are difficult for even native speakers of English to comprehend! (Consider, for example, this line from a Credence Clearwater Revival song: There’s a bad moon on the rise, famously misheard as There’s a bathroom on the right.) That doesn’t mean, though, that a song can’t be a valuable learning tool in the classroom. One way to create a successful song-based lesson is to focus on an aspect of the song that is accessible to English language learners and build an activity around that feature. To do that, you start by examining a song’s lyrics to find a feature you can exploit. (For activities that target one aspect of a song, please see the archived articles in this newsletter or my website, Songs and Activities for English Language Learners.)

For the activity described here, there is no need to give a song that level of scrutiny (although, as always, you will want to make sure the language and content are appropriate for your classroom). All you need is a recording of the song and copies of its lyrics. The simplicity of this lesson, however, doesn’t mean that your role as teacher is any less important. You help students identify which new words are critical to getting the gist of the song’s meaning (and which are not), as well as which new words are worth memorizing. This activity works best if students know at least two-thirds of the words in the song.

Create a Minimal-Prep Song-Based Lesson in 4 Easy Steps:

  1. Students listen to a recording of the song without the lyrics. As they listen, they jot down about five words in the song that they are sure they know. (They do not write down words like the or and.) When the recording is finished, students volunteer their lists of words, and you write them on the board. More often than not, collectively students will come up with the song’s key words. Ask students to guess what the song is about.
  2. Students read the song’s lyrics. You clarify the meaning of new words that are critical to understanding the song, impressing on students that they do not need to understand every new word. Identify which new words are worth memorizing.
  3. Students listen to the song a second time while reading the lyrics.
  4. Students listen to the song a third time, without the lyrics, or they watch the song’s official music video online. (Preview the video first to be sure it’s appropriate for your classroom.)

Sometimes during the course of the lesson, one of the song’s features might pop out at you. You might, for example, notice that it has a chorus that is easy to sing or speak, tells a story that students could summarize, or has a topic that students could personalize with Draw-Write-Share. Then you could, if time allows, expand the lesson on the spur of the moment.

Example: A Minimal-Prep Lesson on the Song “Fight Song”
This song by Rachel Platten debuted last February and has steadily climbed the pop-music charts. Because of its popularity, clear lyrics, and upbeat theme, it is a good choice to bring into the classroom. Continue reading →