Shiv on Learning

Strangely the ELT industry, despite its size, age and importance, has no objective system of evaluating and comparing schools, methodologies or any language learning service.  What is today described as the best pedagogy or methodology is so because it is the good opinion of influential people in the industry, it has not been empirically proven to be so.

While objective measures of effectiveness may seem a challenging task, they exist in many other areas of education. When selecting high schools, colleges and universities students and parents have access to league tables listing, among other things, the percentage of students from each institution that achieve certain goals.

It would be extremely useful for an ESL student wanting to achieve a certain IELTS score to know which school has the better track record of teaching students to pass. At the moment they have to choose a school without access to any such information. All they have to guide them is the marketing blurb from the schools. Even the most expensive English schools do not release data on how quickly students progress.

The trouble with this situation is that schools need to focus on marketing ahead of effectiveness in order to be successful.  A school that is good at marketing need not be good at teaching.

A greater concern is that effectiveness (how quickly the students improve) is not the biggest driver for the industry.  There is no incentive to continually push the bar higher and higher.  To someone like me with a background in the software industry ELT is far from innovative, in fact it is almost stagnant. Innovation when it occurs does so in small communities and does not spread very far. The communicative methodologies have their origins in the 70s, the Dogme ELT group is already 10 years old, yet in that vast amount of time that has passed since their inception neither has become dominant.

For any business to make an investment adopting a new methodology there needs to be sufficient financial reward in doing so. Currently there is none and the money is better spent on marketing.

If league tables of schools were published, better schools would attract more students. The primary driver for change in the industry would become a schools rank in the league tables, their rank determined by students’ progress. As schools strive for better results the rest of the industry will follow, publishers and other suppliers will be pushed to gear their material towards the methodologies that are proving to be more effective.

Implementing such a system is not without its risks. Measures of student progress need to be objective and reliable and also conducted by an independent body.  Tests scores on a reliable exam would be a good indication but the time the student has spent at the school needs to be a factor.

The successful implementation of such a system would bring great benefits to both students and the industry. Students’ progress would become the primary concern of all in the industry. The practice of hiring cheaper less qualified teachers would no longer be fruitful. Investing in staff development would gain greater importance in schools. Successful methodologies would be adopted quickly across the industry and bad practice would be abandoned faster.

The endless debates about methodologies, pedagogy etc would actually have some objective data to draw on. Nonsense debates like “Is an IWB good or bad?” would not exist (it depends on how you use it).

Teachers would be big winners from such a system as any institution wishing to do well would need to invest in good teachers and continually invest in their professional development. Currently in many countries anyone with a university degree that speaks English can get a job teaching it, no qualifications necessary. This would no longer be the case.

The biggest winners however will be students with more of them able to learn a greater amount in less time and probably at less cost. Not being experts in ELT, students are not able to tell if a school is good or not based on descriptions of their services. League tables would provide them with meaningful data on which they can compare institutions.