21 September 2011
We recently attended the 24th annual conference held by the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) in Dubai, UAE to launch their academic year. ‘Moving Forward, Raising the Bar’ was the theme of the one day event which heard from speakers and educators from around the world to discuss and give seminars on current trends in higher education with a particular emphasis on the HCT education system.
A number of Pearson representatives attended the event and gave seminars, including David Booth, Director of Test Development Language Testing, who gave the seminar ‘Understanding Language Scales in Plain English’. The focus of his seminar was to help HCT’s language educators to understand and interpret the levels and meaning of the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR) in their own context. “My aim was to help members of the language faculty at HCT understand more clearly the CEFR levels so that they could relate that to their own teaching and understand where their students were in relation to those levels,” David said.
Pearson’s English language test, PTE Academic, was developed using the CEFR as a reference standard. The test was developed to measure how well a non-native speaker of English communicates in academic English to satisfy higher education English language admissions requirements and student visas for the UK Border Agency and the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship.