The teacher training college, in cooperation with the Provincial Human Resource Department (HRD), is currently running two beginners English classes of 20 students each, called Class A and Class B. The students are Directors and Vice Directors of Departments who have been released from their workplaces for a period of nine months to study five hours a day. The coordinator of the program and three other teachers have the Australian qualification, ‘Graduate Certificate in ELT’, which they gained through the previous AusAID-funded project. But they cannot spend all their time on this course as their skills are also needed for training the country’s future English teachers. So, a total of nine teachers, drawn from the high schools as well as the college, teach 3-4 hours per week each on the program as additional work paid for out of the HRD budget.
The materials used were produced in a one-month workshop funded by AusAID. The workshop produced a syllabus of four modules plus materials and lesson plans to accompany Module 1. These materials are photocopies of commercial materials and a few worksheets that had been made for use in other contexts in Laos such as – I was amused to see – some worksheets I had made in 1990 while working at the National Polytechnic in Vientiane. The Director, himself a graduate of this course, is critical of it. He commented that the curriculum and the materials are incomplete and that they involve too much photocopying. He suggested that resources should include authentic materials such as newspaper articles. The teachers are aware that the materials aren’t directed at government officials, saying, for example, that there are worksheets for teaching jobs and daily routines but they were not the jobs and routines of a government official. But they couldn’t adapt the materials, they said, because they didn’t know, in English, the names of the jobs or the ministries.
Both the HRD official and the TTC Director want a much stronger focus on speaking because of officials’ need to attend meetings and conferences etc. In the HRD official’s opinion, because the current course lacks this focus, graduates can’t function adequately in English when they return to their workplaces and/or have to travel abroad. The Director thought this was a methodology problem as most teachers, he said, use Lao in the classroom and, therefore, students’ conversational skills are still limited when they finish. As an ex-student he is in a good position to know.
I observe a class. The teacher handles a communicative ‘survey’ activity with ease. Both he and the students are clearly very familiar with the activity. He also gives all his
classroom instructions in English, e.g. “Stand-up, please’ and “Get into groups”. The students respond easily. This is no act for me. This is normal classroom behaviour. Very disturbing, however, is the behaviour of four people who started without the Latin script. They appear to have no confidence at all. They avoid eye contact and almost squirm with embarrassment about their lack of achievement in comparison with their peers. When the class was doing the survey, these four tried to shrink away. I approached one of them and began to ask him the survey questions. When he realised I could understand him, he gained a little confidence and answered my questions without ducking his head, but when another student showed curiosity he became tongue-tied again.
The two current class groups are studying at the same level and have been allocated the same amount of time to finish Module 1 even though at the time of starting Class A was known to be more advanced than Class B. Both classes will go on to Module 2 but will be given a different final (grammar) test because “Class B wouldn’t be able to do Class A’s test”. The point of such assessment was unclear to me then, but, rather than risk implying criticism, I didn’t comment or question the decision. (December 1999)
Leaving aside the difference in teaching skills, there were similarities between many of the ministries and the practice in both provinces implementing courses for government officials: the absence of a pre-course assessment to determine language levels; the resultant mixed-level classes; and the paucity of resources to support the program. Unlike the overcrowded conditions in schools, in the provinces and the ministries class sizes were limited to 20 students. This suggests Lao recognition that smaller classes afforded more optimal learning conditions, and also reflects the importance placed on the language learning of government officials. However, in the provincial teacher training colleges, as in the ministries, we found there was little satisfaction with the outcomes of the course. In the journal entry, the teachers, HRD officials and the Director (from his experience as a student of the course) were all critical of the materials hastily developed in one month with previous AusAID funding. All were certain that a course for government officials needed to focus on speaking as a priority and to include authentic materials relevant to the lives of Lao government officials. The case against ‘selecting, procuring and perhaps adapting’ commercial texts (AusAID, 1999b:45) was mounting.
Another point of similarity between the ministries and the provinces was that the highest language proficiency was roughly equivalent amongst the teachers in both contexts. Thus, to the ten teachers we had identified as potentially having sufficient
language proficiency to access a course at graduate certificate level, we could now add fourteen provincial teachers. Having only 24 teachers throughout our network with this level of English had serious implications for the staffing of any course designed to articulate into the English for ASEAN course. The Component 1 team’s analysis of their situation had led them to set the entry benchmark for that course at approximately the level of the International Second Language Proficiency Rating (ISLPR) level 219. This meant that our ‘high level’ group of teachers would be called upon to teach the (articulating) course for which the exit benchmark was only marginally below their own level of English!
The project design was looking more and more unrealistic but we had one more task to complete before the picture was complete. We needed to know more about the students themselves and what they perceived their English language communication needs to be.
Students
To find out the students’ perceptions, a counterpart and I analysed the 300 responses to the survey we sent to officials attending courses in both the ministries and the provinces. The design of this survey sought information about the students’ ‘broad band’ ESP needs as well as their ‘general English’ needs, i.e. it sought insights into their work-related language needs as well as their social language needs. In designing this survey, I drew on my previous experience working with senior government officials in Vietnam20 and on the proposed course content for the English for ASEAN course. This was on the understanding that if courses were to articulate into the English for ASEAN course, then government officials studying the lower level courses would need to develop certain specific language (e.g. vocabulary such as ‘sustainability’) in order to access such a course. The English version of this survey can be seen in Appendix 3.
19
The ISLPR is an Australian testing system developed by Wylie and Ingram (1999). Level 2 is approximately equivalent to the more widely used International English Language Testing System (IELTS) 4.
20
On that particular AusAID project I was a classroom teacher. There being no curriculum, I began my classes based on a self-compiled and very broad needs survey. After this, I was able to contextualise those needs as their preoccupations became apparent in the classroom. From this teaching experience I learnt much about the work of a government official in a ‘least developed nation’ struggling to move from a centrally-controlled to a market economy.
The responses revealed that in the provinces students were drawn from a broad range of workplaces, e.g. the Department of Statistics and the Department of Roads and Bridges, and that most held senior positions (Director, Deputy Director) within these organisations. Students in the central ministries tended to be lower ranking. In both contexts, the majority were at beginner level of English language learning. This could not have been unknown to the project designers as it was in reports (MacLeod & Sithirajvongsa, 1997; UNDP, 1998, 1999) referred to in the project design document. Thus, while it was clearly necessary for the learning pathway to start at beginner level, we were required to develop courses which would articulate into the fully-fledged ESP course, English for ASEAN. This is a long distance for students to travel, and the ‘minimum of 500 contact hours between teacher and student’ (AusAID, 1999b:74) was a gross underestimation for the lengthy curriculum pathway that would be required.
The survey sought student perceptions of important curriculum content to use as a basis for curriculum and materials development. With such a broad range of workplaces there was a danger of there being little consensus. However, while we would not be able to address the specific workplace language needs, we identified the most commonly occurring perceived uses of English, along with the most commonly occurring topics for which the officials considered they needed to use English. Table 3 (on the next page) shows students’ highest priority as being able to discuss their work-related responsibilities, followed closely by wanting English for socialising. From the list of priority needs, this latter is the only one which could be termed ‘General English’. However, the social English these Lao officials wanted would not be found in a commercial text book. The officials needed English for socialising with a foreigner, such as a representative of a development agency, over lunch or dinner with Lao food, with Lao topics of conversation and Lao cultural references. Otherwise, the most important topic they needed to be able to talk, listen, read and write about was human resources development. This is one of the Lao government’s eight priorities for development and many officials were involved, or were expecting to be involved, in development cooperation projects towards the achievement of this goal. They also wanted language associated with Laos in general and with individual provinces in the context of development cooperation, tourism and culture. Their next priority was governance, a topic (as discussed in the previous chapter) high on the priority list of international development assistance agencies.
Table 3: Student perceptions of English needs
English needed for: Topics of common interest:
Discussing work-related responsibilities Human resource development
Socialising Individual provinces (priority of provincial officials) Attending conferences Laos in general
Travelling abroad Development cooperation projects
Attending meetings Culture
Writing reports Tourism
Reading reports Governance
Source: Field notes
The survey sent a strong message, in agreement with the opinions of teachers and administrators, about the content and context of materials, but in conflict with the assumption in the project design that the main task in the development of materials would be ‘selecting, procuring, and perhaps adapting materials’ (AusAID, 1999b:45).