21st century skills: hovercraft to school and robots for teachers?

First impressions

When I first heard the latest buzzword in ELT: ’21st century skills’, what immediately sprang to mind were those flawed visions I grew up with (in the 1970s to the 1990s) of the impending new millennium: space holidays, permanent bases on the moon and possibly on other planets, cities under the sea, hovercraft or spaceships transporting us to work and school, robots replacing teachers as well as those of computers in every home... (oh, hang on, that’s actually happened!) and home schooling by computers... (which also seems to be happening to some extent – with adaptive learning, online learning platforms, LMSs and whatnot, more about all of which probably in a later post).

Then I looked into what the term meant and I found out it was something quite different. (Being an ardent sci-fi fan, I was a bit disappointed it had nothing to do with spaceships.)

Back in the 20th century 

The reason we didn’t talk about ’20th century skills’ when I began my learning then teaching career then was twofold: 1. we were too near the end of the century to name anything after it, and more importantly 2. the difference between the speed of change in the world we lived in. Our teachers’ generation and our teachers’ teachers’ generation passed on their accumulated knowledge and life experience to a new generation, safe in the knowledge that most of their skills are still relevant and useful for the young. Of course, there were changes and developments, shifts in priority, but in broad terms, the skills they could teach us, drawing on their own personal experiences, were the skills we needed to learn.

As far as ELT was concerned, the teacher was the primary, and in many countries, the sole source of knowledge and of learning materials in English. Often, the teacher was one of the few people, if not the only person, learners could communicate with at all day to day, using the foreign language they were learning. Books, magazines, newspapers in English were difficult to come by – and they were often expensive. (At least to us in the Eastern Bloc – we’re talking about the 70s and 80s when we’re talking about my student years.) Teachers were therefore the access points to English as well as the primary role models of non-native language users.

21st century developments

Not so in the past decade or so. With the spread of the internet, access to materials in English is unlimited – written, audio as well as visual materials fill the web and spill over into the real world. Knowledge and learning experiences can now be shared among learners around the globe 24 hours a day, thanks to social networks. A lot of this flood of English is free of charge, too. ... and a lot of it is rubbish. What has changed quite significantly therefore is that learners no longer really need a provider of English, but they need a guide. They need someone to show them how to locate relevant information, filter what is irrelevant or unreliable and to use critical skills to judge the value of whatever is left to use.

The role of teachers is changing, and publishers all seem to be queueing up to ride on the ’21st century skills’ bandwagon. A lot of this activity brings benefits to the learning experience: there is more variety in content and media, more integration of language and other disciplines than ever before. Judging from some of the most recent frontlist publications, there is also a renewed enthusiasm for original (or neatly updated) teaching concepts after a couple of decades of ’if it works, don’t fix it’ formulaic curricula – especially in schoolbooks publishing. 

Find out more about 21st century skills

Steve Taylore-Knowles provides a rationale for why ’21st century skills’ (or ’life skills’ in their preferred corporate parlance) are vital (Why should we teach Life Skills?) on the Macmillan Life Skills website, while Robert Balaguer Prestes gives an informative overview of how learners fit into this whole paradigm (21st century students and skills) on the Pearson 21st century learning website, where there are also a number of related articles by Nick Dawson which I’ve found quite useful. OUP meanwhile runs workshops on the subject, some of which I recently delivered myself in Indonesia and Serbia.

What educators and policy-makers need to bear in mind about 21st century skills is that it is originally a business initiative, a sort of corporate think-tank project (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills) to groom the next generation of workers especially skilled at being adaptable. It was probably quickly realised by the stakeholders that if the scheme is to work, introducing these flexibility skills must obviously start much earlier on – when school education begins. They drew up a helpful diagram to illustrate how this all fits together (image taken from www.21stcenturyskills.org).

What's in it for us?

But what exactly is new about teaching our students the value of Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration or Creativity (the famous 4Cs of ’21st century skills’)? Well, as far as I can tell, nothing really. It is the application of these skills to how language is used as the medium of interaction rather than as the subject of analytical study, to how classroom skills become transferable to life skills, to how ICT skills become integrated with language skills, that makes 21st century skills meaningful to education.

In my opinion, the idea is certainly worth exploring further – especially how it could be applied to benefit language learners. But the concept of ’21st century skills’ is not without its sceptics. CUP organised a debate in 2013 (21st century skills - a 21st century problem?) where some of the speakers questioning whether there was anything novel about these skills at all before exploring its implications for assessment especially. One of the most vocal opponents is Diane Ravitch who outlined her criticism in his article on the subject subtitled An Old Familiar Song (21st century skills - an old familiar song). Ravitch went on to dedicate her blog (Diane Ravitch's blog) to the subject, where she even proposed the promotion of ’19th century skills’.

Like it or not, though, 21st century skills are here to stay. And if you’re a teacher, you’ll no doubt find a meaningful role of it all in your classroom – as you always do with each passing trend in the profession.

Language Testing: The Road to Perfection

Language testing is an unavoidable part of the language teaching experience. 

Some of us have to create classroom tests to check progress in the material, others join full-time testing teams charged with the task of creating an assessment syllabus and a complex exam system for an institution. At one point or another in our careers we all find ourselves in situations where the responsibility of measuring students’ performance is thrust upon us – often without much support or advance preparation. Which is precisely why we must seek opportunities to exchange experiences with like-minded fellow professionals – more often than not to find that the issue you have long been struggling with has already been solved in someone else’s institution. And vice versa.

TEAM 2014, Kayseri

I recently gave a series of talks and workshops at Meliksah University in Kayseri, Turkey which hosted a three-day training event, in co-operation with SELT Academy and IDP Education, called TEAM 2014: Testing, Evaluation and Assessment Masterclass. Professionals from 13 universities around the country came together to share their insights. My fellow trainer Dr. Simon Phipps and I were in equal measures pleasantly surprised and thoroughly vindicated when, on day 2, one of the trainees stood up before a plenary to suggest they all get together informally to continue discussing their testing experiences. In their free time! It is precisely these grassroots initiatives that will provide us with the support that we all need when we design tests.

A three-way tug-of-war

No matter what the context is, there are some shared principles that apply to us all. Creating a language test is always a balancing act between three major forces: validity (how closely the test scores correlate with the students’ real-life abilities as well as the teaching curriculum), reliability (to put simply, how well it measures those abilities) and practicality (how user-friendly our test is).

It is impossible to create a test where all three forces operate at 100%. To give you an example: you can increase reliability by reducing the margin of error. The more test items you devote to checking a particular structure (or skill), the less likely it is that the obtained score are a result of a random factor – like blind luck. However, as you increase the item count, your test will gradually become less and less valid. The more items you devote to a single structure the more you are also shifting the bias towards this single structure – to the detriment to all other aspects of language. And the higher the item count, the more time candidates will need to complete them – which will also negatively affect practicality. It will simply not be worth using a test if it takes so long to get a reliable score.

All we can do is accept the best available compromise. Provided, of course, that the compromise doesn’t involve sacrificing any of the measurement qualities.

What are we testing?

Before we begin developing a test, we must first and foremost pin down what it is what we want to find out. I often define testing as „the systematic gathering of information for the purpose of making decisions” (Weiss 1972, quoted in Bachman 1990) – so the questions are:

1. What decisions do we want to make?

For example: a) which candidates have the required skills and knowledge to enter tertiary education; b) which candidate is most suitable for a particular job, and so on.

2. What information do we need?

For example: a) how much do they know about the foundations of their chosen subject, how developed are their research and academic writing/speaking skills; b) what would they do in a typical workplace situation, how well do they co-operate during teamwork, and so on.

3. What’s the best way of collecting that information?

Now, the point here is that the answer won’t always be: "through a test"! Multiple-choice tests, for instance, are all very impressive and professional-looking, but they will never give us a complete picture of someone’s complex set of skills. The trick is to select those particular sources of information and evaluation methods that give us the information we need. And not something else completely. And not a jumble of a lot of factors that we cannot untangle. And not a lot of irrelevant information just because it was easy to measure it.

What we do with our test must always be appropriate to our purpose, and do just what we need it to do rather than become a burden on candidates. We shouldn't test for testing's sake - we should test because there's information without which we can't make that important decision.

It cuts both ways

But let’s not forget that testing and teaching both have an impact on each other. Tests should reflect prevailing teaching practices (otherwise they are not measuring what candidates have learnt and how they have learnt it), as well as they should have a positive effect on the teaching process – a positive "washback”. (I will blog more on washback later - being a hobby-horse of mine, it would soon become a considerable diversion here.)

The importance of using yardsticks

Obviously, our responsibility doesn’t only extend to what measurement tools we use, but also to how well we use them. Which is why following accepted standards (like the far-from-perfect but nonetheless essential Common European Framework of Reference, CEFR) and, within their internationally transparent framework, establishing our own standards is so vital. To quote Alderson et al. (1995), we need „an agreed set of guidelines which should be consulted, and as far as possible, heeded in the construction and evaluation of a test”.

(In case you want to find out what I meant in my comment above, see my presentation from TEAM 2014 on Slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/SeltAcademy/21-applying-standards-to-testing-plenary-ctsacademic.)

The long road to perfection

Test development is a long, time-consuming process. I’m not suggesting here that, for a ten-minute flash test you must go through all the stages of test planning and writing – simply that you don’t forget about what goes into the development of a good test and take some time to consider all the key factors. The principles are still the same, no matter how big or small your test is.

Test development doesn’t finish when the first complete test is finally written. It’s a cyclical, on-going process, which – I’m sorry to say – never actually ends.

The key to developing good, reliable, valid and practical test is never to rest on your laurels. Plan them well, write them with due care and attention, use them wisely – but never forget to look back on the testing experience, to analyse your data and use them to make improvements to your test before it is used again. In order to find out what needs improving, we must learn the art of feedback - which will, again, be the subject of a future post on this blog. (For those who attended our training, a gentle reminder: remember "sandwich".)

Test development is an ever-rising spiral, with our tests becoming better and better as we go on. Perfection may be far off yet, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be travelling towards it all the time.

Speaking and writing in exam training: blended solutions

I presented this paper on behalf of OUP at the IATEFL conference in Liverpool in April 2013. For those of you who couldn't be there, here's a summary of what we discussed in the session.

Success factors in exam training

When teachers are faced with the task of preparing a group of students for a given exam, there is one known constant: the students, without exception, must attain the level required by the exam. Although this objective – exam success – is clear, there are several factors that necessitate teachers’ attention in the classroom.

First of these is the current level or starting level of the individuals comprising the group. Teachers need measurement tools, both valid and reliable, to efficiently measure students’ level of English in order to establish the starting point for the exam training syllabus. Online and computer-assisted as well as printed placement tests cater for this need.

Another key factor in exam success is familiarity. As one delegate aptly put it in the session: ’there ought to be no surprises in the exam’. Learners need to be familiar both with the test itself (its structure, the types of tasks involved, the amount of time available for each paper and part and so on) and its assessment criteria (to put simply, how candidates can obtain or lose scores as well as the relative weighting of the various papers and parts). The simplest solution is to select course materials designed around the particular exam that learners are preparing for – or to supplement a core course material with such dedicated exam training materials.

Finally, teachers must also provide a balanced coverage of all the language (grammar, vocabulary, functions) and all the skills tested in the exam, both receptive and productive skills. To ensure exam success, the focus should not be on what is easier to quantify and to teach, or what is practical to fit into a lesson timeframe, but on what each learner will be expected to do in the exam.

Potential problem areas for training for productive skills

Writing and speaking both present a number of practical difficulties that teachers must find solutions for. By their nature, productive skills are less predictable (there is often no such thing as ’the’ correct answer) and more challenging to break down into classroom activities.

Writing issues

The writing process proper takes an inordinate amount of time – often more than how much time is feasible in the contact hours available. Writing activities therefore often take place outside the classroom – that is, outside the environment controlled by the teacher. Only the lead-in work, and occasionally some form of follow-up is usually done in class. Task-setting may be done in or outside class, but subsequent monitoring is difficult, impractical, often even impossible. Teachers only find out that some learners got on the wrong track after students have completed their assignments. This then leads to further complications like more unplanned remedial work or a repeat of the writing task, preferably with modified parameters to avoid duplicating the task for those learners who got it right first time around.

Furthermore, if marking is to be thorough, by necessity it will be extremely time-consuming. Conversely, if it is to be done quickly and promptly, it will be superficial.

Speaking issues

All speaking work, on the other hand, is normally done in class – precisely so that teachers can control it. This means learners either have to perform simultaneously, where again the issue of proper monitoring arises, or they perform individually (or in open pairs or groups), which reduces all other learners’ chances to speak. Teachers face the dilemma of providing either maximum opportunity–minimum control/feedback or maximum control/feedback–minimum opportunity.

Blended solutions

Blended learning: the amalgamation of face-to-face and course material-driven approaches with online approaches can provide a solution for the above issues.

The following diagram shows a possible model for covering writing training.

The difficulties caused by the practical necessity of completing writing assignments out of the classroom can be remedied through the use of a Learning Management System (LMS) which allows teachers to set up and monitor tasks remotely. Many online services also offer an automatic (or at least a guided semi-automatic) marking facility for more closed types of writing.

Speaking can also be aided through the use of online learning services (online workbooks, practice tests, etc.), which often offer a speak-and-record facility. Teachers can find similar free-to-use web services online. Embracing social media channels, like online video chat can also enhance exam preparation and extend contact time.

Blended learning may not provide solutions for every exam training issue, but is well worth considering.