Cover Story: Setting Standards For ESL Teaching In Canada

Every day, thousands of adults gather in schools, community colleges, church basements, and other locations across Canada. They come together with a common goal: They want to learn English.

These adult learners have come to Canada from around the world. They bring with them a huge range of languages and educational backgrounds, needs and aspirations. We need a common set of standards with which we can describe adult ESL learners' skills and progress.

Providing a Common Set of Standards and Tools
The Canadian Language Benchmarks provide adult ESL learners and their instructors with that much-needed common set of standards and assessment tools. The Benchmarks help administrators, employers and settlement workers achieve a more complete picture of where learners are in the Listening/Speaking; Reading; and Writing skill areas.
The initiative for a set of national language performance standards or benchmarks developed out of the Federal Government's 1992 Immigrant Language Training Policy, which stated that Canada should have a clear set of language performance standards as a basis for developing reliable tools to assess the language skills of learners.

In order to achieve this goal, in 1993 Citizenship and Immigration Canada established the National Working Group on Language Benchmarks. Its mission was to develop language benchmarks to facilitate the integration into Canadian society of the adult newcomer who needs language skills. In 1995, as a result of extensive research, consultations, and field testing with approximately 3000 participants nationwide, the Canadian Language Benchmarks: English as a Second Language for Adults document was produced.

In November of 1996, the need for an institutional mechanism to assume Citizenship and Immigration Canada's Canadian Language Benchmarks responsibilities was recognized. Subsequently, in 1998 the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks, a nonprofit organization, was established to promote the coherence, effectiveness and consistency of adult (ESL instruction.)

A common set of standards ensures that:

• Language acquisition is described in a nationally accepted and consistent manner
  
• A school's ESL certificate has meaning beyond the school
  
• Employers have an accurate picture of an immigrant's current language skills

Learner-centred, Task-based
The Canadian Language Benchmarks are descriptions of a learner’s ability to use the English language to accomplish a set of tasks. They describe the abilities the learner should demonstrate at each benchmark, under specifically defined performance and situational conditions. Real life tasks are provided as examples of what can be accomplished by learners who are at that Benchmark.

The CCLB is involved in many areas related to the development of standards around the Canadian Language Benchmarks. Examples include:

• Test development
  
• Curriculum development
  
• "Benchmarking" of occupations
  
• Increasing learner awareness of the Benchmarks
  

The Canadian Language Benchmarks are currently being revised, and information about the revisions will be made available at the CCLB web site: http://language.ca/clb/