Category Archives: teacher training

English testing issue in Hungary

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, Hungary, language learning, language teaching, language testing, teacher training

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Last week, students sitting for the school-leaving exams in Hungary were up against the English test on the higher level. This test is something the results of which count towards university entrance exams, so naturally, perceived or real trouble about it counts a lot more than that on the normal level tests. Internet news about the issue with the listening part can be read in Hungarian here. I hope that my interpretation of the situation may be useful for English teachers in other countries as well and may help students understand some features of the situation.

In short, of the 9809 exam takers, in one day, more than 2500 joined a facebook group (though this could be misleading, seeing that parents also joined the group) and submitted a petition to the relevant government agency against the quality of the listening material as they thought the material couldn’t be heard properly because of distortions of sound in classrooms. Some actually claimed the original sound already had echos. We can also listen to it in the middle section of the article, right next to the link to the pdf of the task sheet involved. As my listening to the published material reveals no distortion problems to me on my computer, the story reveals a lot of problems in the Hungarian education system.

Admitting that the inclusion of several French and Spanish words was not exactly fair, I still wonder if that may have disturbed takers. Not only in my teaching practice but also in all teaching materials, there are lots of names from other languages recurring all the time. How can one learn a language without mentioning outstanding people from history, science, the arts etc.? English doesn’t distort foreign names like Chinese does, so this can’t really have been a problem for trained examinees. Trained, I’m saying, and I’m returning to this a bit later.

Another problem claimed was the extreme distortion. The article claims many schools use ancient portable tape-recorders to play … what exactly? The listening material was issued to schools in two copies of the relevant CDs, so no tape-recorders could have been involved. Such a distortion is, to my mind, indicative of the quality of … the Hungarian media. Other than that, CD players may have been of dubious quality, in bad repair, I had already met a number of such equipment 10 years ago. However, if a CD player doesn’t work, it is taken away to be repaired or thrown away and is exchanged to a better one. Some people actually claimed that they didn’t hear the sound sitting in the second row and they have good listening abilities. To my mind, it is doubtful that the teacher administering the test purposefully brought in a bad player with bad loudspeakers to disturb her/his own students. Claiming that the loudspeaker had to be turned up too strongly in the big rooms is also strange: the same students had been sitting in the same rooms for four years listening to the same players at similar intensity. What may have been new, pray?

However, this point only in itself brings the technical background for schools in Hungary in the limelight, and probably deservedly. This in turn underlines the poor financials of the same for extended years. While in my study years we only had really ancient big tape-recorders to listen to the one set of intermittent pre-recorded (that is, unnatural, carefully read-out) listening material, the 21st century makes it necessary to expose students to realistic listening in countries, like Hungary, where English-language TV-programs are practically unavailable and dubbed films prevail in the cinemas. This practice is also in need of changing, but the poor general financial situation makes it very difficult for any broadcaster to buy the rights of contemporary TV programs and air them as they are. And what would be their incentive? That change nowhere to be seen in the pipeline, it is the schools’ duty to provide ample practice for listening. If they can. But that is only one side of the equation.

And that brings me up to my next point. As I said, it is up to schools. But schools consist of not only teachers, there are, in the majority, students as well. Meaning, the vast majority of people in a classroom are the students. Have you ever stood in front of a large group of people who resist all your efforts to bring them together and make them quietly learn something instead of their own will? It’s a lot easier for a party leader to speak to a huge crowd from their own party – they want to hear what he wants to say. Try doing it in front of the opposition. And that is still only speaking, not making them practice performing skills. My experience shows that during the last 15 years the willingness of most students in Hungarian schools to learn has been nose-diving. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, as the proverb goes. More and more students do not want to drink from the fountain of knowledge, so to speak, but weep and wail each time listening is brought in – I faced this reluctance increasingly myself.

I’m not saying it happens everywhere, but that it has been increasing dangerously. Now, if the teacher doesn’t want to antagonize her/his students all the time, she/he yields and there goes the listening practice. This may turn into a general tendency because it is easy to neglect something once again what we’ve already neglected a couple of times and yes, listening is not easy and also not easy to teach. With a decrease of quality students, teachers’ average levels of quality and professionalism may also decline, and in a culture growing towards accommodating the perceived ‘needs’ of the customer (the students), teachers get used to catering to what students ‘want’. And that can be dangerously close to very little. This based on the majority will. And the majority is always right, right? At least before Copernicus …

That said, I’m not saying those students hadn’t practiced listening – I’m saying, what they had done was far from satisfactory, far from enough.

Learning a language has nothing near to the logic of developing mathematical or historical knowledge. It is not even only knowledge, it is rather a huge set of skills. It is a lot more complex than other subjects except for learning a musical instrument, and contrary to beliefs, but due to the complexity as well, there are very big differences in learning abilities, especially if we consider the time constraints. Hence the complaints in the complaining group on facebook, demanding logical, rational answers. No, there may not be logical, rational answers. No, the way we learn languages is next to impossible to follow with logic. Yes, intelligence may have a limited part in it. Yes, it may also be due to psychological barriers, individual learning styles, short- and long-term memory differences, methodological differences on the part of the teacher as well as on the students, to name a few problems. And listening is an area where a lot of those factors converge for many as there is no possibility for individual speed, time to stop to consider and the like. It is thus very tiring and also difficult to really assess. I am next to stating that teaching a language is an instinctive art, with an instinct not easy to develop. So many colleagues in the classroom may give up on trying and practicing listening. It is easier to resort to a dry, seemingly logical structure of what happens easily each time: turn to page … read and answer the questions. Choose … fill in … let me see … correct … incorrect because … (grammar explanation following). Satisfaction – duties have been fulfilled.

Of course, students wanting to take the higher-level test are the cream of the classes. Why couldn’t they perform at the test without problems? Well, it’s because they are a minority of the communities they had been brought up in to be the best. To be the best among a general decline may mean very different from what it meant for us 40 years ago, or for my first groups 30-or-so years ago. Those communities are the real initiators of this protest and the real cause of the problem. They may be the reason why the best may think they are good listeners. Among whom?

Parents seem to subscribe to the general mood of protest. I have seen and felt this too. Parents have become more and more defensive of their children based on the perception that they know their kids better. Parents’ perceptions have been shifting towards seeing, if not the school, then at least the ‘problem’ teacher as the enemy instead of the ally in improving their children’s capabilities and thus future chances. Unfortunately, this perception has been spreading among the student community as well. And this has been happening in a country and culture where parents are more and more inundated with their own work. Before I forget, there is also the other side, the group of parents who can provide their kids with everything they wish for. As one student explained to me a few years ago, “I don’t need to speak English, I’ll have my father’s business and I’ll employ interpreters.” Well, yes, that seems easy for some. If that’s the image they make fashionable, what are the chances for the meek not to follow in laziness? However, that’s already a social problem that I can’t address here. But that’s another reason for the students to consider the teacher the enemy – she/he, the ‘loser’, seems to be powerless against the ‘mighty’ parents, so what do they want? Reminiscent of the situation in Chinese private schools. Does it also remind you of “another brick in the wall”?

I see one positive. And that is that the tasks are still given in English at an English test, something that may often not be the case in the Netherlands, or Italy, or China, for example. I can feel, however, that this may also change as so many other things have changed in the course of the last couple of years in the Hungarian education system. It is always easy to take the easier path. But that is going to be the subject of another article next time.

A few days after I posted this article, on 14th May, what do I see on Dutch TV? Mass protests on the net by Dutch takers of their respective school-leaving exams against the time constraints they thought was too short … while in Nigeria, where more than 270 girls were earlier kidnapped to prevent them from going to school and punish them, people are still hoping that there may still be a future for girls’ getting a profession.

by P. S.

Advertisement

What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in education, teacher training, university education

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

I have just found a very interesting article about what teacher education does not do well enough in the USA. As I have similar experience from other countries, especially from my own, I recommend reading it. I hope some of my international readers will add a few remarks below about the situation in their own countries. The article, from Education Week, “What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You” can be accessed here.

by P.S.

A criticism of translation methods from the point of view of dictionaries

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in English teaching, foreign language teaching, teacher training

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

In this post I’d like to provide further basis for the discredit of the grammar-translation method through looking at the possibility of misinterpretation based on dictionaries.

Lots of English linguists insist that there are actually no precise synonyms in a language, and I can just copy that in my mother tongue too, but even if we allow for synonyms encompassing words meaning almost the same as another word, no wonder that dictionary translations to another language rarely meet the criteria necessary to achieve successful word-to-word translations. Unfortunately, I’m not skilled enough in Dutch so that I can give you convincing examples in the field of meanings, but I face the problem daily if I get near a Dutch person who I could ask. “Yes, what you say/write is ok, I understand more-or-less what you mean, but this is not exactly how we would put it in Dutch.”

Besides this fact, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of cases when the meaning of a word can be completely misinterpreted using the exact foreign equivalent a dictionary uses. This is simply the result when dictionaries don’t bother to give details for exact meaning of the foreign equivalent, and sometimes even failing to mention which part of speech they are quoting. Often there is a mistake to the extent that the purported foreign equivalent doesn’t even exist.

My examples come from two bilingual dictionaries I have, the ‘Kramers handwoordenboek/Engels-Nederlands/Nederlands-Engels’ and the ‘Van Dale Studiewoordenboek/Nederlands-Engels’. When necessary, I check the real meaning of the words with the help of ‘Kramers woordenboek Nederlands’, where English is not used. I know for a fact that smaller dictionaries in the Netherlands are just as often void and useless as in Hungary – I’ve tried to use one or two, then quickly got rid of them. I don’t suppose that the lot of other two-language dictionaries found in abundance in the country are any better – the small Hungarian dictionary is definitely not better, why should the Farsi-Dutch, or Russian-Dutch dictionary be any better? So, here is a bunch of problems I’ve discovered over the last few months in the two large dictionaries, where Dutch learners of English are also likely to look up meanings of Dutch words.

Het weer is omgeslagen – the weather has broken, or Het weer slaat om – the weather is breaking? The clouds, but not the weather. Medemens is frivolously turned to be a fellow man, which would be a fellow creature if used at all by Englishmen. Handelen over iets is correctly given to mean deal with, but to treat (of)? What were the makers thinking of?

Bonenkruid is given as savoury, which is fine if one notices that it’s a noun. Most learners wouldn’t notice the small ‘o’ after the headword, which means it is a genderless, so-called ‘het-word’, and because ‘savoury’ is very rarely used as a noun in English, an unsuspecting learner-translator would be likely to use ‘bonenkruid’ as an adjective, or ‘savoury’ as a noun after encountering the word.

I owe gratitude to the dual-language ‘Kramers handwoordenboek’ that it doesn’t include ‘beamer’ in either the English, or in the Dutch section. This widely-used Dutch word represents the wide-spread misunderstanding that it is an English word, which the ‘Van Dale’ includes, but which the single-language ‘Kramers Woordenboek Nederlands’ excludes. Rightly so.

It can also happen that after the foreign equivalent is given, the headword is put into phrases as examples of use. This should always be part of a good dictionary, though, sadly, it never makes into smaller dictionaries. However, what can a learner do with entries like the following:

eigen 1 own, private, personal met de hem eigen bescheidenheid with his characteristic modesty; dat is hem eigen that is typical of him, (inf) that’s him all over; zich iets eigen maken (ook m.b.y. taal) make o.s. familiar with sth., (m.b.t. taal ook) master, pick up …

I personally appreciate the effort that the makers of the dictionary took pains in this case as in numerous others to supply an appropriate translation to the whole phrase. But shouldn’t there be at least one example where the translation conforms to the given English headwords? In all the three expressions with ‘eigen’, there’s not one which contains the three originally given translations. How is the student supposed to learn the meaning in English if he is to use the grammar-translation method for his own sake? Besides, I can also call it typical that, for the sake of a foreigner studying Dutch, the necessary preposition in the Dutch phrase equivalent with ‘familiar with’ is blissfully missing: “zich iets eigen maken” – van? met? aan? over?

In some cases the translations in the two dictionaries don’t match enough for a learner. ‘het gedrang’ is correctly interpreted as jostling, pushing from the original meaning of the stem-word, dringen, but it’s very likely that the other dictionary is closer to normal use translating it to be crowd, throng. However, even this second one creates problems with giving crush, which lots of young learners must be all too familiar with here from British soaps. Further, if one needs the meaning of in het gedrang komen in his translation, which meaning shall he/she choose: 1. get in a crowd 2. fig. be hard pressed, suffer from one, or (fig) get into a tight corner or be liable to be pushed aside/to be postponed (???)/to suffer from the other dictionary?

In other cases there is simply the danger that the learner can’t find which meaning quoted under the headword is the one he/she needs at the place and moment required.

Bent is given as set, clique, party, which together may vaguely indicate what the word means. Still, one keeps wondering, what if the meanings are apart? Then which meaning of set, or party is to be understood out of many?

Het voorbehoud is translated as reservation; which meaning of reservation? It is a bit hidden among other information that this is not about booking a flight, but about partial disbelief, a restriction.

Summier is defined as summary, brief , and only bn(=bijvoeglijk naamwoord) shows that these are meant to be adjectives (and summier is also an adverb according to the big ‘Kramers’), although ‘brief’ is often used as a noun or a verb, ‘summary’ is mostly used as a noun in English, and neither can function as adverbs.

Het vermoeden means suspicion, surmise, supposition, presumption, still, this word doesn’t mean mistrust as we could also deduct from suspicion. It’s not really a synonym of argwaan as the synonym section in the big ‘Kramer’ lets us believe.

There are similar problems with words like boorijzer bit (which meaning?), zijgen strain (which sort?), solutie solution (to a problem, or chemical?), soos club (a meeting-place, or a bat?), spaander chip (a piece of wood given for a silicon chip in the computer age?), keuvelaarij and keuvelen given as chat (in the internet age, when the meaning is restricted to broken speech of toddlers?), most given as must (when neither culture is used to what steps grapevine-making goes through until wine, the odd learner may be enticed to take it to be a form of the auxiliary – this translation misleads even a wine-savvy Hungarian where the exact same word must is used, with a difference of pronunciation).

I’m not sure that very many Dutch teachers of English are capable of explaining the subtle differences in the fields of meaning of English words in English – one can’t really suppose they can maintain their level of English high without speaking English in class to their students in the first place. Then, if they manage to maintain their English, they can mostly do it with dictionaries. They don’t have so much time to immerse themselves in life in Britain with all those teaching hours over the year. But they should remain the main source of vocabulary input, what with the quality of dictionaries as we’ve seen it, and the probably short hours students invest in studying outside class.

I’m not saying that all my examples play a big part in learners’ experience either. But there are lots of similar examples wherever I look. One can meet these problems in Hungarian, Sino-English or other dictionaries as well. But to do it only in Dutch seems to be just as weird as it is in Chinese or in Hungarian. Sometimes it may lead to situations similar to having to explain to a Beduin what ‘snow’ is like in Arabic, or to a North-Korean what ‘democracy’ means. Or to explain to a Chinese, or a Dutch, for that matter, what the difference between adjective and adverb is. There’s no distinction between the two in those languages …

by P.S.

Answers to our applications – take heart, or give up?

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

When in the Netherlands, judging from the answers that I’ve been receiving, one can’t really stay optimistic for very long. You can imagine the pile of refusals I’ve got in my mail-box, or on my desk (oh yes, there were still a few institutions about two years ago that sent you a real letter even on refusal).

When you get the hundredth or so refusal, you are justified to ask yourself what to do now. To understand the situation, lets have a look at what kinds of answers you can expect. First of all, you get messages that simply state that you haven’t been selected for further procedure. There’s nothing you can do about and with such answers, but they are the vast majority, though, granted, nobody really forgets to wish you good luck to your further applications.

Then you get a few replies that say that you don’t suit their profile. When I first received such an answer, I started to think that perhaps they want someone who’s written more than just one course-book, published more than one other kind of book, has a PhD in Education while he/she is only below 40, has presented dozens of times at international forums (which they surely haven’t even taken part of, as I mentioned elsewhere), and of course lives in the neighbourhood so that the institution doesn’t have to pay transportation costs. But this is not China, is it? Except that in China they’d provide a car with a chauffeur to pick you up if you otherwise suit the above criteria.

Then, suddenly, came a ‘brief’ – it means a letter in Dutch, and yes, it was quite brief, but yet it stated that as I have never taught in a Dutch school, they can’t accept my application. Oh, yeah, I thought, just like my grandma decades ago, when I wanted to climb a tree for the first time in my short, then ten-year-long life, “little kid, don’t try, you’ve never climbed a tree”. So childish! As I then answered, “But how can I ever climb if I can’t try for lack of trying,” I also wanted to answer that, for once, I’d like to do it and prove that a language class is a language class wherever we teach and what is different, even a Dutch teacher freshly out of university has to first try to find out about. Oh, how green was I! Now I know that they can’t get out of university without at least a year of practice teaching.

Still, this answer reminds me of the bondage of serfs in feudalism. Or of bonding Chinese people to their own region in the communist era of yore, which still exists in some areas. Stay where you are, don’t try anything new.

Then came a few other replies giving answers that are a bit different. One from a little town (or village) between here and the German border, really almost at the end of the world says that, due to the great number of applicants, they’ve found better ones, so I’m not among them. Yes, there are so many good ones here, you bet there are! I’ve just received yet another similar one from near Utrecht that informs me that they’ve considered all aspects of the applications, but due to the great number of applicants, I’m not among those invited for an interview. I’m beginning to think that, although the Netherlands has the third lowest unemployment ratio in Europe, there still are dozens of unemployed teachers in most areas, perhaps most villages, of this country. Or there are reasons completely beyond me.

I’ve also recently been rejected by a school where even my job-coach thought I have a good chance. Well, for a vacancy in Tilburg, the sixth city in the country there were three applicants, including me, yet I wasn’t given the opportunity. On the one hand, this number makes it highly likely that the refusals I’ve been receiving with the reason that there were too many applicants were simply lies. On the other, I’ve been given the reason, not for the first time either, that I haven’t worked at such a type of school, VMBO, in the country. Very true. Not in this country. Only in Hungary. In this case, see my remark about feudalism above.

On the other hand, I may think that the serf-like feudal attitude may also be present in the Netherlands on the whole. If someone has come out of the university with a practice period spent in, say, a gymnasium, he/she won’t be deemed suitable for a job at VMBO’s, and this works quite the same way with other types as well. A language class in one is not perceived similar to a language class in another one, though the age of students is the same. Are students in some schools so terribly different from decent students in others that no teacher who’s never worked in such circumstances may be able to cope, although he/she has a long experience elsewhere? Only a beginner can get used to such circumstances? Do we all get so rigid and unadaptable a few years after initiation? I’ve never thought so back in the other countries. We are aware of the logic of the language, of the learning processes of the age-group, and there we go, thought I. No, not here.

One big problem with this attitude is the feudal and childish thinking behind it, referred to above. The other is that it seems to underline the opinion of so many pig-headed youngsters, wherever, who think that a teacher considerably older than they themselves must already be senile, inflexible, unadaptable, rigid – to me implying that they see themselves as such in 10 or 20 years down the line, but, admirably, this seems to be the ingrained opinion of this school system too.

So now what? Does it make a difference if I fight for an acceptance of my old degree from back Hungary? I have doubts, considering the above. But then again, I’ve never been allowed to add to my CV that I’ve received such an acceptance, or that I’ve done practice teaching here in this Dutch school, or like that. I may still entertain the hope that such an experience may make a difference.

On the other hand, it may not. If I simply listen to the voice of the rejections and some political opinions, I may also conclude that this country, one of the founders of Western Europe as an entity back in the 50’s and a staunch member of the EU and the Euro-zone, quietly goes against the very rules they helped created, and more and more resists the influx, formerly seen as beneficial, of foreign knowledge. I may deem it institutional, as I’ve described it in my previous post, but it may simply happen in the heads of ordinary people, or ordinary school staff, for that matter. Even I, never mind a Dutch employer, may not see a reason why I may be chosen against a local teacher as long as there is one. True enough, I may want to create a kind of small revolution wherever I go, by using material out of the English-speaking source countries, bringing in the ‘lexical approach’, the ‘communicative method’, ‘cultural approaches’, or whatever I find as new and interesting, and this may go against the influence of local publishers. But, c’mon, is that so important for the individual schools? Do they get price exemptions if they apply local books?

What advice may I offer to Eastern-Europeans? Seeing the difficulties, they may find it a lot better to stay at home and fight for appreciation in their own land. This one may be a country which has dug itself into the trenches of its own successes and talents – like the old Hungarian vine-producer, who maintains that his method worked with his father, grandfather, with generations back to hundreds of years, so it must still work for him. Never mind that you can’t make ends meet in your fatherland – this is not your fatherland, so you won’t make it here either. This is only a part of unified Europe. Or so it seems.

by P.S.

Dutch teacher education – institutional shortsightedness?

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

It has just happened. Just the way I suspected. But it wasn’t a self-fulfilling prediction. It had to happen on the basis of the laws of the land. I knew it.

My father used to say in the old ‘communist’ era that laws are worth as much as they are upheld. But what about bad laws? Or about flexibility often demanded by life?

What happened was the following. As I have been an English teacher all my professional life, which is to say over thirty years, I have tried to get an official permission to teach here as well. I got my degree, along with a degree in Geography, 33 years ago, which means that I haven’t been able to teach during the three years I’ve been in the Netherlands. I let out some steam, did some other things, and then looked for a job. In vain, as those reading my first post will already have known.

I have always taught students in secondary schools in Hungary, then sometimes above, trained trainee teachers for nine of those years, for which I received additional training, and I did all these a little bit more in China too. I tried teaching young kids too, but I felt I wasn’t really cut out for that. During my training years, I also visited a few primary classes, and then I knew more exactly why I wasn’t. In short, it’s a different psychological and intellectual world. The teacher should behave and do things quite differently as a result with kids below 14.

A few weeks ago I applied for the acceptance of my degree in the Netherlands. Fair enough, they didn’t take very long to answer. The only problem is that they let me know I can’t get the same kind of acceptance as back in Hungary. Just as I had supposed.

To make it understandable what the possibilities are, let me explain. In the Netherlands, a secondary teacher can have ‘erste graads’, that is ‘first-degree’, or ‘twede graads’, that is ‘second-degree’ level qualification (or competence, depending on how you like to translate). In the reality of secondary education, this means that the second group of teachers can teach the lower intermediate classes between the ages of 12 and 16, the first-level qualification holders can teach the upper intermediate classes, from age 16 and above. A holder of this qualification can also teach in some classes of higher education, though not at universities.

The answer I was given states that because I received university education not only in English but also in Geography during the same five-year period, I can’t have received the same depth of training as Dutch students with only one degree, that in English, receive. I can either re-apply for a second-degree acceptance, or I can ask for an additional ‘stage’, that is, training, if I still want a first-degree qualification. Fair enough, one could say, and that’s what I’d half-heartedly expected too. Though I had also hope for something better. In a way I got something a bit better with this offer of an additional training period. But I still have my strong reservations.

My first reservation is that no education below the 850 hours received count towards qualification. On paper, my 120-hour teacher-training course and 100-hour CELTA training is nothing here. Never mind that with the latter I could teach English to adults and young adults anywhere in the world. Never mind that I was able to use the first for nine years to train university students who wanted to get a teaching qualification. These count nothing in the eye of the law, all I could do is to go back to a school and get training as if I were my own trainee. It sounds ridiculous.

My second reservation is that by sticking to the word of the law, my experience of 30 years is neglected and negated. I count as if I was still sitting at university and haven’t finished. I am worth as much as I was around 35 years ago, except that I’ve become that much older.

Third, I could qualify, if I wanted, as a second-degree holder. In Hungarian terms, I count as if I had only studied those two subjects at a teacher-training college for three years, as all primary teachers did and still do in Hungary. It doesn’t make a difference that all university students received enough education to enable them to teach at and sometimes above secondary level. Back in the old days, all university students were only allowed to study two subjects, for the sake of their more flexible practical value, and there was no education above that level.

Next, it seems as if all those studies of the English and American literature, syntax, phonetics and the like were also for nothing. Or as if a Dutch second-degree-holder also gets that much and besides, uses literature for 12-year-olds. My guess is that the real difference is in the methodological preparation and that first-degree-holders are the only ones required to do what I did. As for methodology, no preparation is better than long-term practice, which, in my case, is neglected. Also neglected is the fact that I’ve never received proper methodological preparation for young students, yet I could get a second-degree licence to teach them if I wanted. But if I do, say, a half-year practice, I may get enough preparation to be declared a first-degree teacher. Which counts more: half a year of undergoing mentoring the way I did to others, or 30 years of doing teaching and 9 years of mentoring?

I think, after all, that the most important difference between the teachers who are considered first-level and second-level teachers is that the latter should be trained to do what helps young teenagers, and first-level teachers should be trained and equipped to do what suits older teenagers. There is a world of difference between a 12-year-old’s needs and interests and those of a 16-year-old, and the ability and skills to accommodate and adjust to them can only be acquired through practice, not by attending more or fewer classes at university. The latter fast becomes irrelevant. I think I must insert a quote I already used in one of my earlier posts, but this one, out of a Guardian article, is most highly relevant here:

In recent years a very dangerous idea seems to have been accepted by the decision-makers around the education system that the best teachers are the best qualified teachers, leading to a sliding scale of funding that financially disadvantages those without high-class degrees from the classroom. The reality is very different. A good teacher has to be an exceptional communicator, with patience, common sense, focus, more than a little belligerence and vast reserves of tolerance and empathy. Many prospective teachers simply do not possess these qualities and yet are accepted on to teacher training and even passed despite every indication that they do not have what it takes. The most fantastic academic background cannot make up for a lack of these qualities, but a great communicator with a third-class degree has far more than the necessary knowledge to inspire a class of teenagers.

To neglect these points is what seriously counts as shortsightedness. Cling to the letter of the law and neglect the person with experience. Is this Eastern-Europe after all?

However, it must be said to all people with an older degree from Hungary, and very possibly to all those of my friends and acquaintances from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, or Croatia who have been doing a great job in their respective countries, that if they would like to come to the Netherlands to try teaching, they will have to undergo the same procedure. Rules are rules, we have to obey them if we want to make a living in the West. Equal opportunity may reach the younger generations, those masses who I trained too, but not those few who received their degrees in times when only a few were able and allowed to. Hours of education received counts, hours of education provided since then does not. We are equal in the EU, but still, there are some who are more equal …

by P.S.

RELATED ARTICLES

Related articles

Interesting features of education – Part 3: teacher training in Hungary

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

When I moved ‘up’ to Budapest, as we say, I never thought this move would send me in so many directions, and make it possible for me to live in several countries around the world. At the time, i was a successful teacher in a rural town and never imagined travelling would be possible: the socialist system didn’t let us travel to the West except on a very tight budget every third year. I had only been to Britain once, but the following year saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and opened up opportunities in professional development and elsewhere too.

I soon found myself on a course organized by the newly set-up department of the university, the Centre for English Teacher Training, or CETT and graduated as a certified teacher trainer. It was unique at the time, not only because I came off the first such course ever, but because all teacher training at the time took place at designated ‘training schools’ affiliated to the universities. That system is still in place for all subjects, so let me point out that the normal procedure for training takes place at those institutions within a semester during the last year of studies. it consists of twenty hours of visits and teaching by the university students, so in the Dutch sense of the word, it counts anything but ‘stage’. Discussions and reflexion sessions are done, but the depth and extent of it all is rather limited, and the teachers training the students there are designated to do so on account of their reputation as outstanding teachers, not because they are fully qualified in directing reflexion sessions. The system had a confidence that all getting through this stage and all the trainers do and will do a great job.

While I was doing the training course, I met a completely different system of thinking, and the most important message was that our job was not to show the trainees how to teach English, but to make them develop to their full potential as teachers without criticizing them. This is a unique feature in Hungarian education at large, which I kept myself to all through the years while I did this kind of work.

This mentor training course we are offering was developed by Caroline Bodoczky and Angi Malderez. The course material was published by Cambridge University Press titled Mentor Courses and it was the Winner of the 1999 Ben Warren Trust Award for ELT Methodology books.

(quote from the web-site of IATEFL-Hungary)

The outstanding feature of this system was that training was intensive and fully immersive. Trainees were asked to go to the school, which was not necessarily a training institution, several days a week and hold lessons for one class of students all throughout the year in pairs. These pairs were fully responsible for their teaching and evaluation and all aspects of their work, were allowed to make their own decisions, but were supervised by the trainer. Every teaching our was discussed, disseminated, evaluated in detail. Self-reflection was the order of the day. Trust was the basis for it all to work well, and it did. Even those trainees that didn’t really want to go into teaching afterwards, did their best.

Unfortunately, the system existed only for about a decade and only in Budapest (though this means a very sizable part of newly initiated students in the country), and then it was scraped by new laws. Training time was cut to half, most of staff at CETT was made redundant, and this for most meant a huge step back towards the usual, much less effective format. I did this for one more year and then left.

The old, semester-based format is the only teacher-training existing in Hungary now, except that with English, the format is filled by the same fully-responsible trainees coached by colleagues trained with me or a little later. I’m happy to see that IATEFL-Hungary is organizing a mentor training course next year, which may attract a few young teachers again to the trainer/mentor profession and will be able to train their trainee students at their local schools for at least a semester. Elsewhere, it’s twenty hours watching and doing it, counted together. With this, we are back to the old days of mostly academic training coupled in the last few months with a little look into how teaching is done. Let me quote one of the articles from The Guardian (to be found below among the articles), which clearly states the most important qualities of good teachers versus academic knowledge:

In recent years a very dangerous idea seems to have been accepted by the decision-makers around the education system that the best teachers are the best qualified teachers, leading to a sliding scale of funding that financially disadvantages those without high-class degrees from the classroom. The reality is very different. A good teacher has to be an exceptional communicator, with patience, common sense, focus, more than a little belligerence and vast reserves of tolerance and empathy. Many prospective teachers simply do not possess these qualities and yet are accepted on to teacher training and even passed despite every indication that they do not have what it takes. The most fantastic academic background cannot make up for a lack of these qualities, but a great communicator with a third-class degree has far more than the necessary knowledge to inspire a class of teenagers.

The only positive side of English teaching in Hungary is that this is the section in education whose members stick relatively strongly together, hold meetings, annual conferences, training courses among themselves, it’s all dynamic. The teaching philosophy seems to be relatively level, teachers trying to use modern, communicative methods, building on students’ interests and abilities. However, the aim is the same for all: put students through exams at the end. And that doesn’t make it easier at all.

by P.S.

Related articles

Interesting features of education – Part 2: teacher training in the Netherlands

10 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in English teaching, language teaching, teacher training

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

I was recently lucky to meet someone who explained the ways of becoming a language teacher in the Netherlands.

The different levels of education in the Nethe...

The different levels of education in the Netherlands (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As it happens around the world, teaching a language starts by following university courses. In the Dutch system, universities constitute the WO section of education, which stands for ‘Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs’. Those who wish to become teachers, have to do practice teaching as well as following university courses during the last two years of their studies. This is called ‘stage’, pronounced, unlike pronunciation of the English word of the same lettering, as /’sta:ʒǝ/. In general, teaching practice takes several days a week over a year, when the student visits and later conducts lessons in several hours a day, followed by ‘reflexion’, that is, discussion of what has happened, what went well and what didn’t, and what could change another time. There is also opportunity follow university studies part-time, in which case practice lengthens a couple of years and course-work formats are changed somewhat.

In theory, this system looks very good because it gives over a hundred hours of practice for the development of the trainee to become a full-blown teacher. However, as a former teacher trainer confided to me, the quality of trainees is often quite low, while trainers often neglect their trainees, cutting down on the reflexion stage, sometimes to a quarter hour per week, sometimes to nothing. In this case the whole idea of development through discussion, reflection and self-reflection suffers a deadly blow, as it happens to a friend of mine also on ‘stage’. Her practice turns out to be a full-time job without being paid. It looks like employment-lead training in Britain, except that there she would be paid a salary.

Teaching practice takes place at schools of any kind anywhere in the system where the leadership offers opportunities to those on practice time. One looking for job opportunities most usually reads about vacancies for people with one year experience in their specific sector (VMBO/MAVO, MBO, HAVO, HBO or VWO for secondary-level applicants) followed by saying that ‘stagiaires’, those on teaching practice, are also most welcome. There are a few ads for people with several years of experience, but the stated number is usually below five years. This probably doesn’t have much to do with refusing experience, but a belief that those freshly out of WO have more dynamism, but also with a very steeply rising salary-scale until fifteen years of experience. This to me means, on the one hand, that the system believes and appreciates a fast improvement in quality with the first years of practice, but also that experience quickly becomes expensive. However, older, more experienced teachers don’t get further pay-rise, so they don’t become overly more expensive for schools to employ them instead of a 40-year-old. Hopefully, this gives chances for older people to move, but it my also be an indication that most experienced teachers don’t usually have any incentive to do so.

This system is different from the British or Hungarian systems. In Britain, for a teaching diploma, one needs a separate line of studies after the specific subject is fully completed, at which point the would-be teacher enters teaching college. Here I would need help from British teachers about the ways of how and where teaching practice is carried out, as I have no relevant experience. However, one article, listed below by Daniel, describes the author’s path to teaching and out of this article, we can safely deduce that teacher training in Britain has a great variety of forms depending most often from the training school’s own ways. As teaching requires post-grad studies in Britain, the Dutch system may only resemble this in its institutional variety.

How the – much more unified – system works in Hungary is discussed in a the following post.

by P.S.

Dutch Flag

RELATED ARTICLES
MORE Related articles