A Model for Training Teachers to Identify Common Reference Levels in Written Production Activities

Abstract

This paper presents a teacher training programme, the purpose of which was to train a secondary education teacher of English to identify common reference levels in written production activities. The first phase of this programme was based on the familiarisation and standardisation phases in North et al. (2009) and allowed the participant to familiarise herself with the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2001) and to reliably identify common reference levels of English in both standardised and local performances. During the second phase, the participant assessed the written production competence of a sample of Year-9 pupils of English and assigned a common reference level of English to each pupil. After analysing her scores with generalizability theory, several high reliability coefficients were obtained. Such results demonstrate that this training programme, including its assessment procedure, can be adopted as a model for training secondary education teachers of English to identify common reference levels in written production activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]