How the Workshop Went

There weren't many of us - but it was very nice to see the people who could come. It's the half-term holiday in Swedish schools at the moment, so a lot of the network members were away.

However, we had a very interesting evening. Chris outlined the main issues with linking the Swedish grading system to the CEFR levels in the first part of the evening. Then in the second part we all watched a couple of Cambridge's training examples of interactive oral exams for a couple of their English language tests. We showed an A2 and a B1 performance, which are supposed to conform to the end of Class 6 and the end of Class 9, according to Skolverket. We made sure, though, that the participants didn't know what the level was before they made their own judgements.

It was very interesting to see that the teachers and teacher trainees there quickly came to a consensus in each case … and that afterwards the consensus was that the A2 level was too low for Class 6 (more like Class 4), but that the B1 level was about right. I wonder what that says about English in Classes 7-9 …

Here are the links to the Adobe Connect recordings from last night:

Teachers' Meeting about Assessment of Oral English Part 1 (52 minutes long)

Teacher's Meeting about Assessment of Oral English Part 2 (40 minutes long)

We can't make the actual video clips available here for copyright reasons, but you can visit Cambridge's site and access both the video clips (for all levels from A2-C2) and the judgements of the Interlocutor and Assessor via this link:

Examples of Speaking Tests

Now we're waiting for Skolverket to produce 'official' versions of what the grades are supposed to mean. Should be some time in the New Year, so we'll be back with you then.