Suppose you have just completed French Level 4. What standard are you at? Can you ask for directions, read L'\u00c9tranger<\/em>, conjugate the pluperfect subjective, book a hotel room, express your thoughts on the Arab Spring, recognise the past historic tense, or discuss Moli\u00e8re\u00a0on French TV?<\/p>\n

It depends of course. In my most recent report of \u2018non-specialist\u2019 language learners (in other words, those not doing a degree in languages \u2013 I\u2019m not really sure about the term), I asked learners to provide me with the exact title of their course. I then mapped their answers to the standard they said they should have reached by the end of the course. What I found was that Level\/Stage 4 courses appear at all three levels to which I mapped the course titles.We have a Level 6 at A1\/A2, a Level 8 at B1\/B2, a Level 4 at C1\/C2 showing just how every institution has its own system. Thinking radically for a moment, why don\u2019t we standardise our course titles?<\/p>\n

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Some of the advantages I can think of include:<\/p>\n

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1. More learners would be able to\u00a0articulate\u00a0their level to employers or other stakeholders. (Over a third of learners were unable to say what standard they should have reached by the end of their language course)<\/li>\n
2. Learners would be able to continue their language learning at another institution (e.g. if they got a job in another part of the country or wanted to continue studying at a higher level not available at their current university).<\/li>\n
3. We would be able to collect better data cross-institutional on the language abilities of \u2018non-specialist\u2019 language learners.<\/li>\n
4. Students might be less worried about whether a certain level of course was too easy or too difficult for them.<\/li>\n
5. We could have a national recognised standard for all language learners (you could argue that we could\u00a0achieve\u00a0this simply by putting CEFR levels into every course title).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
   A defence of the current unstandardised system would be most welcome!<\/div>\n

   Read the full report.<\/a><\/p>\n

   
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     Suppose you have just completed French Level 4. What standard are you at? Can you ask for directions, read L'\u00c9tranger, conjugate the pluperfect subjective, book a hotel room, express your thoughts on the Arab Spring, recognise the past historic tense, or discuss Moli\u00e8re\u00a0on French TV? It depends of course. In my most recent report of … Continue reading Should we standardise language course titles?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,33,36,37],"tags":[88,98,104],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-european-framework","category-languages","category-learning","category-llas","tag-cefr","tag-iwlp","tag-language-levels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}