Accommodating complete beginners during a 60-minute placement test
It is important to detect who the complete beginners are before leaving them with 60 minutes in which to complete an impossible task.
In an ideal world, language schools would know the names and host families of learners who have no previous knowledge of the English alphabet and would be able to send them directly to classrooms where teachers are equipped to focus on basic literacy. These classes need special resources, which would not be appropriate for learners who are already familiar with the Roman alphabet.
True beginners, who have had no previous contact with the Roman alphabet, need to be taught in very small groups using materials such as those listed below or the free handwriting worksheets I have provided in the basic literacy section of this site. Plenty of teacher time, input and encouragement will be needed before these learners are ready to progress to very elementary general course books.
Schools ready to offer English to true beginners should have a bank of literacy materials to provide for their special needs and staff with experience in teaching basic literacy. There are good phonics handbooks on the market now that look-and-say methods alone have proved insufficient and that phonics has undergone a revival. Although many of these materials are intended for children, they are a good source of ideas for developing your own worksheets for adults. The BBC is also a source of materials for adult literacy: e.g. BBC Adult Literacy Handbook, edited by Chris Longley (1975).
Published handwriting practice materials
For adults
- Start by Writing - suitable for Arabic language backgrounds - John Naunton [88 pages: Longman 1985]
- Basic Handwriting in English - suitable for Arabic language backgrounds - Bernard Hartley & Peter Viney [62 pages: Nelson 1982]
- Handwriting: Workbook - Bright and Piggot [32 pages: Cambridge 1976]
- Handwriting: Teacher's Book - Bright and Piggot [34 pages: Cambridge 1976]
- Practical Punctuation - Ian Gordon [80 pages: Heinemann 1978]
- Collins Good Punctuation - Graham King [192 pages: Collins 2004]
Literate, but very low level beginners
If learners are already familiar with the English alphabet, but are clearly very low-level beginners, it may still be unfair to make them suffer the same placement test that you give to others. As soon as it becomes apparent that these learners are struggling, another task could be given (i.e. a useful holding activity) instead of the test. Good schools will be equipped for this. As an alternative to the Placement Test, the backup kit could comprise:
- a very easy reader containing useful illustrations
- a gap-fill worksheet that matches the text of the reader, and an audio recording containing the full spoken text.
The task might be to fill in the words omitted from the worksheet.
My own unpublished manuscript First Time in England was designed with elementary students in mind. The linguistic content and situations reflect the survival needs of a beginner or elementary student visiting England for the first time, attending a language school and staying in an English-speaking family. First Time in England is set on an incline of difficulty which rises with the level of progress I would expect a beginner (with knowledge of the Roman alphabet) to make if they were receiving 25 × 45-minute lessons per week over four weeks. I would not recommend a complete beginner to book a full-time course in an English language school for less than four weeks.