Gap Training Ideas for NESB Background Students in VET

I recently had this question from Dannielle Icke, who teaches Graphic Design and Web Development:

“I’d love to pick your brains around working with ESL students and technology in an English based setting. It is certainly an area I have had quite a few challenges with in. Teaching Graphic Design and Web Development to students that struggle to write, speak and read English has been an area I’d like to improve. Most students do an English Cert III before attempting my course, but often they haven’t passed all units in their English course, so there are gaps I have to try to address with reasonable adjustments. I’m wondering if you have any clever reasonable adjustment ideas or general support/teaching methods I could consider for my ESL students – keeping in mind that the area I teach is very technology and software heavy.”

The Certificate III in CSWE is being phased out for international students and will soon be replaced by ELICOS streamed curriculum including EAP for entry into your courses (Grace, 2019). In my experience there is quite a jump from CIII CSWE to CIV CSWE and some students come in a little underdone when using it as entry into VET . Unfortunately the work they will do as assessment will be mainly employment and business related and quite broad in scope; you will also find that technology and web-development won’t be on the agenda of most ESL teachers and a dedicated ESL program to prepare your students for your stream of studies may be an expensive proposal.

If you are on your own, the first thing you need is a diagnostic test to get an understanding of their ‘real’ level. I recommend a quick one like TESTTrack, which you can sign up for an account for. The rigorous tests are fee-per-test but the level test is free. They are mapped to the can-do statements within the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2018).

Once you have your level you then need to discern the area of deficiency; which core skill is requiring the most help?

You could simply be facing a vocabulary issue. Is there jargon and industry specific terminology that is very new to them? You could research word-frequency within your texts and lectures by using a search engine like Lucene.

Once the database is collected you then need to engage them in activities that encourage the use of these words. I have outlined a large number of resources for each core macro skill in a couple of other posts on this Blog.

References

Council of Europe (2018). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The CEFR Levels. Retrieved from https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions

Grace, A. (2019) Australian VET Providers Surprised by ELICOS Regulation Decision. The PIE News. Retrieved from https://thepienews.com/news/australian-vet-surprised-by-elicos-decision/ 

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