Standards differences 1

Difference among Australian, European, American and

Colombian standards

Ana Clara Sanchez

Paula Andrea Urbano Gomez

Yuli Guachavez Dominguez

Marolyn Guerrero Ceron

University of Nariño

Lic. English and French

October 2011

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Many years ago, people believed that teaching was

broadcasted directly from professors to scholars, with

occasional help. Learners were not expected to build up routine

of mind and learning abilities in the classroom because they

should have them implied. Students were seen as containers to

fill information. By the other hand, nowadays students’

knowledge is developed by doing activities focused on achieving

goals and individual goals are meaningful.

What is a standard?

A standard is implemented to support an effective teaching

for a good academic outcome. It serves as a support to carry out

high interaction levels and academic productivity.

Standard is a document established by consensus and

approved by a recognized body that provides for common and

repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristic for activities

or their results, aimed at the achievement of optimum degree of

order in a given context.

Why do we need standards?

The importance of setting reachable standards in

educational institutions is that they ensure efficient learner

development. Some advantages of using standards are:

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a. Accountability: standards hold teachers, schools and the

districts responsible for what goes on in a classroom.

It helps to generate a process of accountability.

b. Achievement: setting standards ensure that higher levels

of learning can be attained. It helps teacher improve on

the existing system by aiming for a higher achievement.

c. Assessment: it guides teacher in assessing what the

student knows or how they can manipulate and apply the

information.

d. Transparency: setting standards in schools enables a

clear communication and publication processes for

everyone involved in child education. It helps to snip

corruption at the bud and create a better education

system for our children.

Very generally, a standard may simply be defined as a “set of

rules for ensuring quality”.

After analyzing what a standard is, and why we must use

them in schools we are ready to attempt to establish the

differences between American, Australian and Colombian

standards.

American ESL standards are organized around three goals and

nine standards. Moreover, each standard is subdivided into:

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descriptors, sample progress indicators, and vignettes with

discussions. Here we can see an example of the organization of

the American ESL standards:

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In the Australian standards, we can notice they have a

different organization, taking into account the students needs

and teachers’ ones and they are based on the curriculum.

Australia has a national curriculum framework to ensure high

academic standards across the country. All schools provide

subjects in the eight key learning areas: English, mathematics,

studies of the society and the environment, science, arts,

Languages Other Than English, technology, and personal

development, health and physical education. Schools have English

language programs for international students to support their

studies.

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The Australian standards are applied to teachers too, are

different to the students ones but they keep a close relation

with each other in this country the standards are well

structured they take into account the scholar background. Many

of this students arrived to this country with little English and

most of them do not have a literacy instruction. This reason

they start English from the zero level helping students to learn

to write and to read too.

The common European framework takes into account the

context in which they live; taking this as a base they created

their standards. Moreover, they take into consideration the

“multilingualism”. The common European framework states their

standards with different aspects in this way:

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Now, we can see the translation of the common European framework

in the “standards” in Colombia (supposedly they are the same):

Red color: QUALITY Blue color: APLICABILITY

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We couldn’t talk about quality in education especially in

English due to standards are not based on the context,

culture and needs of our students. As you know they were

taken from the CEF (common European Framework).

Moreover, quality must take into consideration the entire

actors in this process. So, teachers must know this in order

they can reach the goal, however, they do not know how to

use the standards. It is supposed that standards are a tool

to have the equal proficiency level in urban and rural areas

but, it is not true since of the lack of contextualized

standards, motivation, resources , time, conditions in an

equal way for all Colombian students. The government is

always pulling the institutions to get a quality level in

education however they do not give them proper conditions.

We, the common European framework have

as a purpose that develops the

communicative competence because ours

standards are based on multilingualism. It is

taken into account the cultural part of each

language and use English as communicative

way in our proper context.

Our American standards are based on the learners

needs the quality of their instruction is better because

they really need it. They develop communicative

competence in a Proper condition to learn. We have

three goals each one with nine standards divided in a

specific and adequate time to reach them. They know

that language acquisition is a long term process

consequently it occurs through meaningful use and

interaction.

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In our context, we cannot speak about

applicability because we don’t have the proper

conditions to become the standards and the

purpose of the Ministry of Education real. The

time we have here to teach English is not enough

to get the students engage in the learning process.

The government wants Colombia bilingual in the

2019 without enough and efficient resources. The

plan is not being developed in the correct way due

to the lack of English teachers and the standards

quantity to be developed in a very short time.

Our standards are applicable in our

instirutions because they were developed in

our real context. Moreover, we have enough

resources to achieve the goals we have

proposed in the common European

framework.

In our country, standards are well structured. They

have a stage, a progression profile and a progress

indicator to show the evolution of students. They

describe how to reach them.

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PERSONAL OPINIONS

With regards to the national standards in Colombia, they

have many inconsistencies, for example, in our public schools

Our standards are the best among others

because we have them well structured with

three goals and each goal with three

standards taking into consideration the levels

of learning our students have. The

government promotes the teaching of a

second language depending on the context

students interact with.

In the context of our country (Australia), they are

applicable because we take into account the

background of our students for the reason that,

sometimes they have had contact with the second

language. They were created by us to teach us so it

keeps in mind our real environment.

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there is a few time to develop a big quantity of content.

Because of that, English teachers must “fly” to complete the

standards without taking into account the learning obtained by

learners.

We think one problem, for having a good English teaching is

that in our setting, teachers expert in other fields teach

English; therefore, the basis for learning English are not well

substantiated.

From our point of view, we strongly believe the standards

in our country needs to be designed, but not being translated

from other country, bearing in mind our culture and teachers and

students’ needs. Besides, we need committed teachers in English

teaching. After having designed the standards, they must be

applicable in different settings in Colombia, because there are

different ways of learning and teaching and after having applied

these standards, it will continue with the analyses of results

to see if they give good results or not. Moreover, government

could realize which the most suitable conditions are for

teaching and learning English trough standards.

One important question about the standards which were translated

from the common European framework is: Why do not we have

standards written in English?

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References

Ayala. J. & Alvares. A. (2004). A perspective of the

implications to the common European Framework implementation in

Colombian socio-cultural context: Colombian applied linguistic

journal; number 7

Common European Framework of reference for Languages(2001)

Estándares Básicos de Competencias en Lenguas Extranjeras:

Ingles( 2006). Ministerio de Educación Nacional; Colombia

n.n (no year) crafty syntax; professional building board: why

implement standards in schools? Retrieved 20 October 2011 from

http://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/why-implement-

standards-in-schools/

Standards for foreign language learning (no year). National

standards for foreign education: American council on the

teaching of foreign languages, Inc. Washington.

www.etsi.org/website/standards/What is a standard.aspx

http://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/why-implement-

standards-in-schools/