Level of English Skills

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

This post might not fit here 100%, but since I need some input from English teachers on language skills, I thought this is a good place.

I have the following situation: I run the global training department for a big Taiwanese company. One of my tasks is to identify suitable trainers for global training. I am a training professional, so I have no problem identifying the people and presentation skills. However, I also need to set a criteria for the level of English language knowledge.

I have very good local trainers here, but there is a lack of English. Now I would like to set a development goal for these employees in regard to English. Unfortunately, I am completely unfamiliar with all kinds of English certificates and tests and their suitability for my challenge. For example, I would like to write down a development goal, that a trainer has to pass the TOEFL test with a score of xx points (just an example, since TOEFL is the only test I know).

Does anyone have any practical proposals for this challenge?

2

TOEFL and IELTS are tests of academic English, so might not be suitable for your needs. Most companies in East Asia seem to prefer the TOEIC when judging the English ability of employees. Unfortunately, it is a norm-referenced test and so is really being misused for this purpose. It does have some strengths - it’s well put-together and enables students to clearly see improvement each time they take it. It also now tests productive skills as well as receptive skills, although I have no idea how effectively the productive skills are graded. Sometimes this can be almost farcical, such as on the GEPT.

My suggestion would be for you to take a look at BULATS. This is a test of business English similar in design to IELTS and TOEFL. It is, though, pretty difficult and might create motivational problems with the employees you are dealing with. An internal test would be the ideal solution, testing English skills directly related to the tasks the employees need to carry out. However, this would require a lot of work and might not be possible logistically.

3

BULATS is the most detailed for business. It matches expected skills for a business setting with test score ranges. Bringing people up to the level of giving a good presentation in English is a very long term goal unless they already have the language skills and you want to train them in delivery.

4

[quote=“swisskogame”]This post might not fit here 100%, but since I need some input from English teachers on language skills, I thought this is a good place.

I have the following situation: I run the global training department for a big Taiwanese company. One of my tasks is to identify suitable trainers for global training. I am a training professional, so I have no problem identifying the people and presentation skills. However, I also need to set a criteria for the level of English language knowledge.

I have very good local trainers here, but there is a lack of English. Now I would like to set a development goal for these employees in regard to English. Unfortunately, I am completely unfamiliar with all kinds of English certificates and tests and their suitability for my challenge. For example, I would like to write down a development goal, that a trainer has to pass the TOEFL test with a score of xx points (just an example, since TOEFL is the only test I know).

Does anyone have any practical proposals for this challenge?[/quote]

What level of English are you working with?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you have trainers already in whom you want to increase English proficiency.

Personally, I’d develop a criterion referenced checklist of my own if I were you. That would give you the ability to cherry-pick exactly what skills you need and ignore the rest of the vast subject which is English. It would also give you a basic set of goals to give to whoever you employ to train your employees in English, from which they can then develop a curriculum. If you put in areas for comments you can gather qualitatve information along with the quantitative information and use it to identify employees who excel in specific areas and develop peer-led groups so all of your employees can benefit from each other’s strong points.

On the other hand, it might be a hell of a lot easier to start with people who can speak English at the level you need instead of trying to set a development goal of proficiency in English for current employees.

5

First off, the best benchmark would probably be BULATS. This is designed to test what students can actually do in a business setting rather than just their theoretical knowledge of English. It’s related to the Common European Framework for Language Learning, which is basically a set of common standards adopted in Europe so that employers don’t need to know about all the different examinations. That’ll give you a good idea of what level your students are at.
bulats.org/Bulats/The-Tests.html

I think there is also a sample test on the website somewhere.

The caveat is that if an adult went to a good school, studied hard for a long time, gained high level qualifications, and still doesn’t have good English, then there isn’t much point giving them more English training along the same lines. They’re obviously not stupid, but there is something they’re not getting. How are you going to address the deficit if you’re not qualified to interpret the results of the test and identify the roots of the problem?

6

And

In many ways, I do agree with these sentiments. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It all depends on how you define “language skills/proficiency.”

For instance, someone may be great at giving presentations in Chinese (which I assume is the case from what you’re saying) and have good language skills if measured in terms of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc., but still be unable to give good presentations to colleagues around the world.

I have a student who came to me with this problem last year. We can sit and chat about the state of the economy or management issues within her company (a major MMC), and she regularly conducts trainings for her team in Taiwan. But when asked to train a group of foreigners, she was completely out of her depth. We put together a good presentation for her over about 10-14 hours, and the training went well. The next one she brought to me for tweaking when it was in the advanced stages, say 90% finished, and it only took a few hours of work together to reach a level we were both happy with. I still look over her presentations, but it’s just polish now.

Similarly, I’ve had students with mediocre English - inappropriate verb endings, weird random vocabulary - who were fairly adept at getting the message across. I remember one guy in particular who had ‘studied’ English for over ten years, and was averaging 4.5 in the IELTS test. (It’s graded on a scale of 1-9, he took it three times.) After just ten hours of adjustment to his thinking he got 5.5, which was what he needed. His English was still crap, but his effective ability had increased 25% with some fairly small changes to what he was doing. He has a long slog ahead of him before he can really function well, but at least he’s going in the right direction now.

These issues are very much cultural, and test-designers in western countries seem to be still largely oblivious to the fact that Asian test-takers often don’t think like English-speaking academics. The tests will give you pointers towards areas that need improvement, but don’t always reveal what the real problem is.

At the same time, if someone has studied English for many years and is still not at a high level then it’s probable that they never will be. Either they just don’t have the ability, or there is some other barrier.

From an early age, most Taiwanese are taught to think about English in a way that prevents them from ever ‘getting it’. Some break the mould and figure it out for themselves, and some are better taught, but the majority reach a plateau (around IELTS 6.0) which is determined by the constraints of their own thinking. They come into the classroom knowing what they want, and if you want to make money in this game you have to give them what they want. (Adults are not like kids, they don’t stay in school for years and years, they want a quick result and tips to help them pass a test.) So the industry revolves around perpetuating the mistakes that prevent students from reaching a higher level.

There are trainers that will give your people what they need rather than what they want, but if you’re not an expert then how are you going to differentiate between them? Most corporate English training is a waste of money, and even a good trainer will be a waste of money if they can’t get buy-in from the students.

eg I once had a class preparing students for the IELTS test in which one student complained that it was “too much fun.” It didn’t matter that she was ‘incidentally’ practising exactly the skills that were listed on the IELTS website as important. She had her own agenda and kept insisting that “in Taiwan we learn in this way.” I tried asking if her way got the result she wanted, and whether a 36-hr course giving her exactly the same as she had been doing for the last 15 years would somehow magically give her the 15% improvement in her grade that she needed, but she didn’t want to answer those questions. We argued, incidentally, in English and she understood everything. She even lost her temper in English. But she couldn’t solve a problem or re-negotiate a contract due to the way she thought.

This attitude is very common, and if your students don’t agree with you about why they are getting the grades they’re getting, then there is not much you can do. I usually manage to get buy-in from 60-80% of my students, depending on what their expectation and commitment level was before they came into the process.

For the record, I have been teaching in the public school system in Taiwan since 2002 and doing adult classes, IELTS prep, corporate training, for almost as long. I currently teach several classes at a leading university, including training sessions for experienced high school teachers. I have several long-term clients in major multi-national corporations. I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.

Summary: I still agree with the guys above about this being a long-term goal.

7

Some interesting data here about Taiwanesers compared to other countries. It’ll give you an idea of what is achievable or normal.

ielts.org/researchers/analys … _2009.aspx

ielts.org/researchers/analys … _2009.aspx

Note that Taiwanesers average much higher scores for speaking than they do for writing. Then go to work and ask your students if they think Taiwanesers are better at writing or speaking. Most will tell you something that is contradicted by the scores achieved.

8

I think you are thinking about this wrong, you need to invest in your people. Pack them off to an English speaking country for one year, send them to your branch offices. Do you think they can learn from a class in Taiwan. They need the environment, the interaction with foreign teams to learn different ways of doing things and also to improve their language skills. Global training. Tests are not the answer.

9

Thanks for the various input.

I agree with most of your statements. Tests are not the answers to everything. But I need to look at this from a practical point of view. I have employees here, who are very good engineers and therefore our key people in technical support. I can therefore not send them off to a language school or other subsidiary. They are also good as trainers, as long as they can do it in Chinese. And they love training other people. They do it sometimes in English, but I can see from my observations and the follow-up questions, that their English level is not up to the task. It’s not so much their knowledge of the language, but the way how they use it in oral communication (written communication works generally very good).

Now, I have been leading both training departments and teams in Europe before. If you identify an issue like this, you just talk to your employees and then tell them, that they need to improve their language skills in this and that area. Employees will then go, look for solutions and come back with proposals. Then you decide on one measure and the problem gets solved. However, this is not how it works here. If I tell my people that we need to work on their English skills, they will ask for detailed solutions (what test? how many points? how many hours? what school?). This is the reason, why I try to establish some kind of criteria that I can use for such situations.

I will have a look at your proposals and see what I can make of it. Thanks already for the help.

10

because the thinking is in Chinese.

Their language is fine, but are they intimately familiar with Western formal argument, capable of presenting ideas and supporting them in a Western format?

Loretta’s dead right. The major difference between a mid level (6) and a high level (9) in ALL the major tests, including IELTS, TOEFL and TOEIC is thinking. From mid level on, it’s not about the language, it’s about using the language to express ideas, about problem solving, presenting and supporting arguments, comparing, contrasting, evaluating and so on. These are precisely the skills that are NOT taught in English education, or bushibans, and the lack of them is why Taiwanese fare poorly in the tests - and if your Taiwanese trainers went through the Taiwanese system, it’s likely they lack these skills too. If they don’t have them, how can they train people who expect to be trained in a Western way? I can quite understand if they’re comfortable teaching Chinese people stuff in a Chinese style which both trainers and trainees are intimate with and comfortable with…

If you want a test, I’d say demand a certain score for the productive TOEIC test, the speaking and writing one, the one that the Taiwanese avoid like the plague because it’s all about expressing ideas and solving problems, all the stuff they’ve never been taught and don’t know how to handle.

Then get a teacher who can teach it. Loretta’s probably the best in the business. I’m not based in Taipei, but do teach this online, if you want to PM me for details.

11

Tests such as TOEIC can be useful because they motivate people to study English. Unfortunately, the negative backwash of these sort of tests is students look to become good at doing the test rather than concentrating on communicative skills.

If you just want to get the employees to get out there and study English then do what most companies do and set a required TOEIC score of, say, 600. Be prepared for many of them to go to a cram school where a Taiwanese teacher will teach, in Chinese, how to get a high score while conducting a massive vocabulary build of single words. They will still be studying English, of a sort, so it’s better than nothing.

12

It’s worse than nothing. It costs time and money, but doesn’t achieve anything useful. It will focus them on doing things that don’t work, instead of encouraging them to get out of their comfort zones and start doing things differently. It will reinforce their flawed perceptions. All of which makes my job harder when they eventually wash up in my classroom.

13

FWIW, I used to do a lot of level testing for high schools. All of the teachers agreed that once you’re familiar with it you can pretty much allocate the students into bands A-E within the first thirty seconds. Taiwanese consistently make the same mistakes at different levels, so as soon as they have made a few you know what all the others are going to be. Of course, we always let the students do the whole evaluation, so that they felt like we had given them a fair chance, but it was extremely rare that anyone surprised us.

With IELTS/TOEFL students, it’s pretty much the same. A minute of conversation is enough to know what their level is.

Engineers, btw, can be very rewarding. They’re usually more systematic, and more open to logical analysis of what works and what doesn’t. Once you change the way they think about English, they often make much better use off what they already know. There is usually a perception that engineers don’t have the right personality to be good communicators, and many of them buy into it, but I don’t think it’s true.