The Global Scale of English and planning: A perfect partnership

Leonor Corradi
A teacher helping a student at a table

As a teacher, I realized that planning had become an 'automatic pilot' routine from which I did not learn much. Like many others, I thought scales such as the Global Scale of English (GSE) or the Common European Framework of Reference are just that; references that are beyond the realities of their lessons.

However, I've seen that the GSE is a very powerful resource to help us at the level of planning.

If you're using a coursebook you may have noticed that, after completing one of the books in the series, students move up one level, such as from elementary to pre-intermediate or from intermediate to upper-intermediate.

We all understand what it means to be an elementary or intermediate student. These levels are usually defined in terms of structures – conditional sentences, passive voice, and tenses – Simple Past, Future Continuous, etc.

But why do students want to learn English? Using it means being able to listen or read and understand, interact with others, and communicate in writing. Even if it is parents who enroll their children in language institutes, what they want is for them to use the language. We can see a mismatch between how levels are defined and students' aims to study English.

Here's how the GSE can help English language teachers

First, you need the right scale for your group – Pre-primary, Young Learners, Adults, Professionals or Academic, which can be downloaded at:

/languages/why-pearson/the-global-scale-of-english/resources.html

Focus on your students' level. There you will see all the learning objectives that students need to achieve to complete the level at which they are and move on in their learning journey.

What are learning objectives?They are can-do statements that clearly describe what students are expected to achieve as the result of instruction. In other words, these objectives guide teachers in our planning to help students learn.

When we plan our lessons, rather than working at lesson level only, we should reflect on how the activities proposed are referenced against the learning objectives of the level. We may see that some activities need some adapting in order to focus on the selected learning outcomes.

At the level of planning as well, I also use the GSE to analyze the activities proposed in the materials I am using. Let me tell you what I do. Let's take listening, for instance. You may use the downloaded scales or the Teacher Toolkit that the GSE provides. Let's run through how this works.

Image of the GSE Teacher Toolkit

Here's the link to the Toolkit:

  • In the 'Learning Objectives' tab, choose the learner: Pre-primary, young learners, etc.
  • Then move the slides at either end of the scale so that you only work on the range you are teaching.
  • After that, select the skill you want to focus on, in this case Listening, and click on 'Show results'. You'll get a list of the LOs for listening at the selected range. You can download it as a pdf or Excel document.
  • Next, analyze the listening activity proposed in the materials used. Are the items in the activity at the right level? May the students need guidance or support? Are they required to extract information, an operation that may be beyond their level? Are there learning objectives that are not present at all?

After the analysis, I sometimes decide to add objectives, which I write on the board or will add support and guidance to the items in the activity. Occasionally, I divide the items into A and B categories, with A being at the right level and less demanding than B items.

I share this with learners and challenge them to complete some of the B items. But since they know they are more challenging, they're less likely to get frustrated if they cannot find the right answer. Also, as these tasks are more demanding, I might play the audio more often or chunk it and stop at each chunk.

You may think this is time-demanding, which is true, but it's time well invested, not wasted. On the one hand, I'm helping students reach their target level. On the other, I am tailoring all activities, personalizing them. What's not to like about this?

Since starting using the GSE myself and with groups of English teachers, I have seen improvements in students. They know what it takes to move on in their learning process and feel more responsible and committed to it. It's their decision, not mine. Another realization is that this type of reflection directly impacts my teaching methods. It makes me more reflective and focused on my students' needs and it has changed lesson planning into a learning practice.

About the author

Leonor Corradi is an English teacher based in Argentina. She is a former member of the Foreign Languages Team at the National Ministry of Education in Argentina, in charge of English and coordinator of state plurilingual schools in the City of Buenos Aires. She has extensive experience as a materials designer and coursebook writer and is an academic consultant for different educational institutions such as the British Council, and Ministries of Education in Latin America.

She has run professional development courses for teachers and has presented extensively at national and international conferences. She is the author of the Curriculum for Foreign Languages for the City of Buenos Aires (2001, English) and has been an ELTons Judge since 2014. Leonor has been a member of the Global Scale of English (GSE) Advisory Board since 2014 and is a GSE Ambassador.

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    Grammar: how to tame the unruly beast

    By Simon Buckland

    “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings”- ѴDZè

    When you think of grammar, “rule” is probably the first word that pops into your mind. Certainly the traditional view of grammar is that it’s about the “rules of language”. Indeed, not so long ago, teaching a language meant just teaching grammatical rules, plus perhaps a few vocabulary lists. However, I’m going to suggest that there’s actually no such thing as a grammatical rule.

    To show you what I mean, let’s take the comparative of adjectives: “bigger”, “smaller”, “more useful”, “more interesting”, etc. We might start with a simple rule: for adjectives with one syllable, add -er, and for adjectives with two or more syllables, use more + adjective.

    But this doesn’t quite work: yes, we say “more useful”, but we also say “cleverer”, and “prettier”. OK then, suppose we modify the rule. Let’s also say that for two-syllable adjectives ending in -y or -er you add -er.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either: we do say “cleverer”, but we also say “more sober” and “more proper”. And there are problems with some of the one-syllable adjectives too: we say “more real” and “more whole” rather than “realer” or “wholer”. If we modify the rule to fit these exceptions, it will be half a page long, and anyway, if we keep looking we’ll find yet more exceptions. This happens repeatedly in English grammar. Very often, rules seem so full of exceptions that they’re just not all that helpful.

    And there’s another big problem with the “rule approach”: it doesn’t tell you what the structure is actually used for, even with something as obvious as the comparative of adjectives. You might assume that it’s used for comparing things: “My house is smaller than Mary’s”; “John is more attractive than Stephen”. But look at this: “The harder you work, the more money you make.” Or this: “London is getting more and more crowded.” Both sentences use comparative adjectives, but they’re not directly comparing two things.

    What we’re actually looking at here is not a rule but several overlapping patterns, or paradigms to use the correct technical term:

    1. adjective + -er + than
    2. more + adjective + than
    3. parallel comparative adjectives: the + comparative adjective 1 … the + comparative adjective 2
    4. repeated comparative adjective: adjective + -er + and + adjective + -er/more and more + adjective

    This picture is more accurate, but it looks abstract and technical. It’s a long way from what we actually teach these days and the way we teach it, which tends to be organized around learning objectives and measurable outcomes, such as: “By the end of this lesson (or module) my students should be able to compare their own possessions with someone else’s possessions”. So we’re not teaching our students to memorize a rule or even to manipulate a pattern; we’re teaching them to actually do something in the real world. And, of course, we’re teaching it at a level appropriate for the student’s level.

    So, to come back to grammar, once we’ve established our overall lesson or module objective, here are some of the things we’re going to need to know.

    • What grammatical forms (patterns) can be used to express this objective?
    • Which ones are appropriate for the level of my students? Are there some that they should already know, or should I teach them in this lesson?
    • What do the forms look like in practice? What would be some good examples?

    Existing grammar textbooks generally don’t provide all this information; in particular, they’re very vague about level. Often they don’t even put grammar structures into specific CEFR levels but into a range, e.g. A1/A2 or A2/B1, and none fully integrates grammar with overall learning objectives.

    At app, we’ve set ourselves the goal of addressing these issues by developing a new type of grammar resource for English teachers and learners that:

    • Is based on the Global Scale of English with its precise gradation of developing learner proficiency
    • Is built on the Council of Europe language syllabuses, linking grammar to CEFR level and to language functions
    • Uses international teams of language experts to review the structures and assess their levels

    We include grammar in the GSE Teacher Toolkit, and you can use it to:

    • Search for grammar structures either by GSE or CEFR level
    • Search for grammar structures by keyword or grammatical category/part of speech
    • Find out at which level a given grammar structure should be taught
    • Find out which grammar structures support a given learning objective
    • Find out which learning objectives are related to a given grammar structure
    • Get examples for any given grammar structure
    • Get free teaching materials for many of the grammar structures

    Think of it as an open-access resource for anyone teaching English and designing a curriculum.