Teaching development grants final and financial report: Assessment and standardization of English language teaching field experience

The primary objective of this project is to achieve measurably improved standardization within the English Department in the assessment of practice teaching, or field experience (FE). Current practice includes one standardization meeting per year for primary and secondary programmes. Staff are also encouraged to accompany one another on FE assessment visits in order to share experience. As a more systematic and evidence-based approach to improved standardization, this project will develop a staff training program, with explicit standardization criteria and training resources. Information dissemination processes by which students engaging in FE are informed of and guided with respect to the recommended standardization criteria will also be proposed. The training resources will include an extensive database of annotated, authentic teaching practice videos. The project will utilize several recorded lessons already available but primarily aim to collect a new, comprehensive set of videos that reflect the diversity of present practices and contexts. These will be lessons taught by student-teachers in pre-service programmes of the English Department and analysed to provide department colleagues comprehensive FE assessment criteria and descriptors to facilitate their assessment of FE practice. A variety of lesson types representative of those encountered by colleagues in FE assessment will be included. They include a variety of grade levels, lesson content types, performance levels and school environments: 1. Grade level - including secondary and primary ESL lessons taught by student-teachers. 2. Lesson content - including grammar-based teaching, language arts, diverse text-types and language skills practice and development. 3. Performance level - including lessons which represent the different department marks for FE, including distinction, credit, pass and fail. 4. School environments - including schools of different banding, schools with different student 'cultures', such as those with a more academic or vocational orientation, schools with large minority populations, schools with behavior problems, academically-oriented schools and EMI and CMI schools.