I recently attended an IATEFL BESIG workshop that featured the Pearson Global Scale of English. I’ll be diving into a business English course for the first time this winter. The topic of the workshop seemed really practical and useful for this context. The speaker introduced participants to the work Pearson has been doing with the Global Scale of English over the last decade or so. In this post, I just want to kind of reflect on the content of the workshop and how it might be useful for my own teaching context and share some interesting resources with you.
What is the Global Scale of English?
To start, I want to explore the Global Scale of English a little bit. The project is perhaps less well known than its predecessor the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). CEFR has been around since 2001, and it’s the basis for many language programs and resources. And while the bands in the CEFR are useful for instructors and learners, they are sometimes difficult to work with in day-to-day teaching and learning.
GSE Toolkit Overview
The Global Scale of English includes a toolkit for educators and learners that can help pinpoint English proficiency. It offers a scale that has a bit more precision than the CEFR. In addition to the incremental scale of proficiency, the GSE offers different content and learning outcomes for different types of learners. For instance, the GSE has different learning outcomes for academic, general, and professional English. It can also be broken down further by learners’ age.
The Scale
According to the Pearson website, “At the core of the GSE is a numerical 10-90 scale. Calibrated to this scale are thousands of learning objectives derived from extensive research with over 6,000 learning experts from more than 50 countries around the world.” I can’t speak to the research done to develop the scale, but Pearson has more information about that on their website. Check it out if you’d like to learn more.
If you’re familiar with CEFR, you know that it can take learners a while to progress through a single band. In particular, the intermediate bands (B1-B2) include a lot of skills and content. Learners can sometimes feel stuck in these levels even if they are actually making progress.
The GSE offers a bit more insight into the progress that learners might be making within the CEFR bands. For instance, learners can see that while they are still within the B1 band at the end of your course, they’ve actually progressed from B1 47 to B1 52 with the GSE. Without getting into the specific scale values and such, the GSE allows you to drill down into each CEFR band and reference different proficiency levels more easily.
How could the GSE be useful for teachers?
Ok, so there’s a new, more granular scale of English proficiency. But how might this scale be useful for teachers?
I think the GSE Toolkit is probably the thing I’m most excited about for my own teaching. With my business English course, there aren’t really specific learning outcomes that all instructors need to adhere to. There are kind of broad learning outcomes that instructors should stick to, but there’s really a lot of flexibility in the actual content teachers can include in their classes.
For me, a first-time business English instructor, I want specific learning outcomes to guide the content I put into the courses. I think the GSE can offer some support in this area with the GSE Toolkit. Let’s take a closer look at the toolkit.
The GSE Toolkit: Learning Objectives
The toolkit includes an interactive dashboard where you can explore learning outcomes, grammar, and vocabulary in relation to the GSE. It also has a text analyzer. I’m definitely interested in trying it out, though. My exploration of the toolkit here will be limited to the learning objectives tab. But I hope to dig into the grammar, vocabulary, and text analyzer tabs later.
On the Learning Objectives tab of the dashboard, you have a few ways to filter the learning outcomes. You can choose the type of learner, specific skills, and even types of jobs within the professional learner filter.
Professional Learners Example
In the first video below, you can see how I narrow down the learning outcomes according to my specific learners in a business English context. The outcomes are organized by skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), but also by specific business skills (having discussions, emails, meetings, negotiations, etc.). The dashboard integrates content from o-net that lists job descriptions and skills needed to perform specific jobs, so you can also filter the outcomes by occupation. Finally, I can narrow the proficiency range as well to generate more applicable outcomes for my learners.
With the learning outcomes generated in the toolkit, I can see the CEFR and GSE levels as well as the specific target skills related to the outcomes.
A2 Adult Learners Example
In the following video, I generated outcomes for a lower-level (A2) general English course of adult learners. In this example, you can see there are language skills and communication skills listed. Specifically, I wanted outcomes related to the communication skill of “comparing.” There are outcomes for both receptive and productive skills. The outcomes generated also include specific grammatical concepts that would be useful to achieve mastery of the specific outcomes.
Let’s wrap this up
So, for me as I develop the schedule and materials for my courses, having specific learning outcomes aligned with specific CEFR and GSE levels will be really useful. I can include these outcomes in my lessons, and learners will know exactly what we’re working towards. The outcomes will be useful for me to make sure I am including all of the content the learners need in our courses. And when developing a course for the first time, it will save me a lot of time not having to write learning outcomes on my own from scratch.
If you’re teaching an existing course with learning outcomes already in place, I suppose the GSE toolkit might be interesting to explore and compare with what you’ve been doing with learners. It could validate the content you’re using or perhaps suggest you make materials at a different level.
Regarding using the GSE Learning Objectives dashboard to develop course content, Pearson offers some guidance here.
Thank you for reading! If you use the Global Scale of English toolkit or other content in your teaching, I would love to connect and compare notes. Until then, happy planning!
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