European Profiling Grid

Nearly 12 years ago, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment was launched.  

Since then, talking about levels of language competence seems to have become a lot easier and clearer. 

Parents and students, as well as teachers and language specialists, publishers, exam boards, seem to be speaking the same language!!  I overhear mothers and fathers saying 'He needs a B1' to get into university.  'She has to pass B2'.

And of course, the Cambridge English exams are all clearly aligned to the different levels.

Some time ago, I found out about another European project:  The European Profiling Grid.  

I signed up to receive information about the European Profiling Grid Project and last Friday, I got an email to tell me that the interactive grid is now available on the official Project Website.

I've copied the Objectives of the Grid from the official website:

Objective

The aim of the European Profiling Grid (EPG) project is to help improve the quality and effectiveness of language training thanks to an innovative instrument: the European Profiling Grid.

Designed for teachers working in Europe in language centres and schools, this tool aims to :

• help better identify training needs;
• provide a reliable means of evaluating and self-evaluating professional skills;
• facilitate recruitment thanks to a transparent evaluation system;
• foster mobility by enhancing professional skills.

The EPG Grid is not only a tool developed for the use of the language teachers but also for their trainers and employers.

The Grid was originally developed by EAQUALS and used in it inspections.  There are now more organisations involved:  

Partners

Centre international d’études pédagogiques (CIEP), France
Evaluation & Accreditation of Quality in Language Services (EAQUALS), UK
British Council, UK
Instituto Cervantes, Spain
Bulgarian Association for Quality Language Services (BAQLS OPTIMA), Bulgaria
Goethe-Institut e.V., Germany
Center für berufsbezogene Sprachen (CEBS), Austria
ELS-Bell Education Ltd (ELS Bell), Poland
Università oer Stranieri di Siena (UNISTRASI), Italy
Hogeschool van Amsterdam DOO (HvA), Netherlands
Sabanci Üniversitesi (SU), Turkey

I couldn't find the Grid on the EPG website, but I clicked on the link to the Webinar that took place last week and listened to it (watching it when the interesting bits I wanted to look at came on).

The webinar is quite long - an hour.  The first part is really an introduction to the Project and the actual Egrid that I wanted to find out about appears about half way through - 30 minutes into the webinar.

As I write this post, the Egrid does not seem to be online, but I did find a pdf document on the EAQUALS website here.

From what I can see, this could be a useful training and development tool.  

And if you didn't read my post back in July about the ELT Snapshot Survey, you might like to read it now because it's very thematically related!

Where are we heading? Revisited....

Back in April 2007, I was asked to give a workshop and a session at the APPI conference in Lisbon about the situation in Europe regarding the teaching of English.

I spent a good month preparing the session because I wanted the information I was sharing to be as accurate and up to date as possible.

A lot of work, believe me, but as so often happens, I've found that the information that I discovered has come to be so useful since then.  Facts like the percentage of teachers in Europe who were set to retire in the following 10 years (opening the doors to new teachers and maybe the chance to make changes in a school).  I know one school locally that is doing just that.  They wanted to introduce a bilingual project and teach subjects through English.  As teachers retire, the new staff member they take on has a good level of English.  If only this kind of forward planning could take place more often ..... .

Which brings me to what caused me to write today's post.  The school year is kicking off.  The number of emails I'm receiving every day has grown tremendously and suddenly.  I was looking through some of them and clicked on the links in the TeachingEnglish newsletter.

One of the links took me to the

I remember drawing on the information in the previous survey when I prepared my APPI presentation.

I think it will make interesting reading for many of us.  Just added it to my 'to do' list for today!

(Now I can cross off 'Write a blog post' from my list!  Done!!!)

Are you a typical ELT teacher?

Top on my list of things to do today was to write this post!  I have been meaning to sit down and write all week, but have lots of things to finish off and wrap up for the testing I've been doing and each day ended with no blog post written!  So today, I'm going to start off by writing this post, then move on to tidying up my study!!!


One of the things I've been planning to write about is the survey I took part in.
A few weeks ago, I filled in my answers to the Snapshot Survey by Cambridge English Teacher.   They wanted to form a picture of what being an English teacher is like.



And 2 weeks ago, I received an email telling me that the results of the survey had been uploaded to the Cambridge English Teacher website.

I was not one of the teachers who said they had ended up in ELT 'accidentally', but I never intended making a career of it!  After a year in France as a assistant, I came to Spain to teach for a year and 28 years later, my Spanish 'year' is still in progress!  I have several teacher friends who say the same!

You can download the results of the Snapshot Survey as a pdf file.  It would be useful for class I feel - students could work out the original questions and interview you and see if their teacher is 'typical'!