English Language Course for Teachers and Education Staff

A “B1 or above” requirement keeps out exactly the teachers a foundational English course exists for. This week starts from the level below A1 and works in the Council of Europe’s own four modes — not the four skills most courses still teach.

• Monday — you place yourself honestly against the descriptor scales, mode by mode, and seal a first self-assessment for Friday.
• Tuesday — you handle the spoken exchanges a teacher can’t avoid: the corridor, the staffroom, the unannounced phone call.
• Wednesday — you draft and correct the four short texts the job actually requires.
• Thursday — you work mediation: relaying, explaining and easing a misunderstanding in English, the part of the job you already do daily in your first language.
• Friday — you run Tuesday’s and Thursday’s tasks a second time, then write a profile of your own English in the Council of Europe’s wording.

You go home with a written self-assessment across all four modes, backed by two rounds of peer observation, in language your school, a partner institution or your National Agency already reads. Nothing here assumes a level you don’t have — the week is built from the level below A1 up.

There are teachers who stop at the staffroom door, let the partner-school email sit unanswered, and find a reason for a colleague to take the visiting delegation. The week is written for them.

Two of its changes matter here, from when the Council of Europe updated its own framework — published online in 2018, then in its final edition in April 2020. A level below A1 was defined and named — Pre-A1 — so that “beginner” stopped being the floor of the scale and became a described place on it. And mediation — one of four modes the CEFR named back in 2001, alongside reception, production and interaction — finally got its own descriptor scales; until then it was named but not measured. The four modes themselves are not new: reading and listening were already one mode rather than two, and speaking to somebody was already a different activity from speaking at them. What 2020 added was the ability to actually place someone on a mediation scale — and mediation, passing something on so that another person can use it, turns out to describe most of what a teacher does in a day.

So the week is organised by mode rather than by grammar chapter. Monday is reception, and an honest reading of where each participant stands against the scales. Tuesday is spoken interaction: the corridor, the staffroom, the phone call that gets answered without warning. Wednesday is production and the writing the job actually requires — a message to a parent, a reply to a partner school, a notice for a door. Thursday is mediation, and it is the day that changes what people think they are capable of, because relaying has descriptors down to Pre-A1, explaining a simple visual starts at A2+, and the scale for delicate situations opens at A1 with noticing a disagreement and showing sympathy — only actually repairing one waits for B1.

Friday runs Tuesday’s and Thursday’s tasks a second time, with the same descriptor scales in the observers’ hands as on Tuesday and Thursday — a use the framework proposes itself, suggesting descriptors be used “to observe and, if desired, to (self-)assess the language use of learners during the task”. What comes out of it is a written profile of a participant’s English in the Council of Europe’s own wording, mode by mode, at whatever level it honestly sits — uneven across the four, most of the time, which is what a real profile looks like. And because it is written in the framework’s own terms, it travels: the same profile means the same thing in Lisbon as in Tallinn.