Rosemary Wette

Making the instructional curriculum as an interactive, contextualized process: case studies of seven ESOL teachers:

This article reports on data from interpretive case studies of seven well-qualified, experienced teachers of adult ESOL, collected through weekly interviews and analysis of documents and materials produced over the duration of a whole course for each teacher. Teachers’ knowledge and experience was apparent in their ability to conceptualize and plan globally in the pre-course phase, to establish rapport and diagnose learners’ developmental priorities as soon as teaching began, and to weave a coherent instructional curriculum1 from a variety of components and dimensions of conceptual content according to the developmental needs, wishes and responses of learners, syllabus pre-specifications, constraints of the teaching context and their own personal theories of best practice. The study draws attention to a number of differences between the curriculum making practices of experienced teachers and the content of language teacher education texts with regard to pre-course planning procedures and the separation of syllabus and methodology. Dissonances were also apparent between conventional descriptions of process—product orientations and strong—weak versions of communicative language teaching on the one hand, and the blended, non-standard approaches apparent in the courses in this study. The article identifies curriculum making principles and practices that were common to a number of teachers as a contribution to practice-based disciplinary knowledge and second language teacher education literature.

How Professionally Relevant Can Language Tests Be?: The Author Responds

I am happy to take up the right of reply to John Pill’s response to my commentary on “English Proficiency Tests and Communication Skills Training for Overseas-Qualifies Health Professionals in Australia and New Zealand” in the recent special issue of Language Assessment Quarterly (Wette, 2011), and for the opportunity it gives me to clarify and comment further on some of the issues raised in that article. The main aims of my commentary in this issue were to outline a particular context in which tests of English proficiency are used to screen overseas qualified health professionals seeking local registration, and to argue for a more diagnostic approach to assessments of proficiency in English for this group, for a broader view of what constitutes effective communication skills in healthcare contexts and, if needed, the provision of publicly funded instructional support to assist overseas qualified health professionals to achieve their goals. In New Zealand and Australia, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Occupational English Test (OET) are currently the only means by which the communicative abilities of overseas qualified health professionals are assessed from a language perspective (although Pill is correct that in both countries, testing of English proficiency is followed by assessments of medical knowledge and clinical communication skills from a medical perspective). My view, shared by the overseas qualified health professionals in Read and Wette (2009), the international medical graduates who commented in Submission 101 to the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry Into Registration Processes and Support for Overseas Trained Doctors (2011), and a number of teachers of English for medical communication (Submissions 50, 63, 64, 95, 110 and 152), is that although these tests are rigorous assessments of academically oriented linguistic competence, they do not directly assess the kind of pragmatic and discourse competence that health professionals need to master in order to communicate effectively with patients or clients. The sources cited in the previous paragraph also maintain that in recent years the passing standard of English proficiency has been raised, and that it is now unreasonably high (the IELTS requirement is now 7.5 for speaking and listening and 7.0 for reading and writing for doctors in New Zealand, and 7.0 minimum for doctors in Australia, whereas candidiates using the OET pathway in both countries must achieve B grades in all four skills in a single test attempt). As a