Education & Training – B2 English Listening Exercise

9 quality control 10 intranet 11 venue 12 daily tasks

13 department meeting 14 handouts 15 group discussions

16 budget 17 two weeks 18 travel expenses

Mark: Good morning, everyone. I’m Mark, the Staff Development Officer here at the college. I’ve called this brief meeting today to run through a mandatory administrative procedure that applies to all teaching staff. As you know, the institution heavily funds various external training courses throughout the academic year. Following your attendance at any of these events, you are now required to complete a post-course feedback evaluation form.

Now, I know paperwork is everyone’s least favourite chore. You might think we just want to see if you enjoyed the day out, or if it helped your personal development. Obviously, those things matter, but the primary reason for this mandatory procedure is quality control. We need to ensure the institution is getting a good return on its investment.

So, where do you find this document? You might expect us to simply email it to you along with your booking confirmation, or perhaps hand out a paper copy before you leave. But actually, to keep everything centralised, you need to download it directly from the staff intranet. Just look under the ‘Professional Development’ tab.

Let me walk you through the form itself. The first section asks for some basic logistics. While recording the name of the trainer is useful for our records, and people always like to comment on the catering, what we really need your thoughts on is the venue. If the acoustics were terrible or the seating was uncomfortable, we need to know so we can avoid booking it again.

Moving on to the core of the evaluation, we look at relevance. It’s easy to get swept up in fascinating new teaching methodologies. However, we don’t just want to know if the overarching theory was interesting. Rather, we need you to explain exactly how the training directly applies to your daily tasks. If it doesn’t help you in the classroom or with your lesson planning, it wasn’t the right course for you.

We also expect a return on investment through knowledge sharing. If you learn a great new strategy, keeping it to yourself isn’t helpful. While a casual chat in the staffroom over coffee is always nice, it isn’t enough. We expect you to present a brief summary of your key takeaways at your next department meeting. There’s a section on the form to outline exactly what you plan to share.

Then there’s a section evaluating the materials you received. The digital slides are usually standard and often emailed afterwards, but we’d like you to specifically rate the handouts you were given on the day. Were they clear, relevant, and something you can refer back to?

Of course, we also want your honest criticism. Not every course is perfect. Some people complain about the journey getting there, or the quality of the lunch provided. However, it’s feedback regarding the group discussions that really helps us decide whether to use that course provider again. If they were poorly facilitated or dominated by one person, please note that down.

Towards the end of the document, there’s a space to suggest future courses you’d like to attend. Please bear in mind that while we try to accommodate everyone, we can’t guarantee approval. It doesn’t just depend on your teaching timetable; it always ultimately depends on our budget. We have to allocate funds fairly across all departments.

Regarding the deadline, please be proactive. Don’t just leave it sitting in your inbox until the end of the term, or even the end of the month. The form must be completed and submitted within two weeks of the course ending. This ensures the details are still fresh in your mind.

Finally, please be aware of the compliance rules. I know it sounds a bit strict, but failing to submit this form has consequences. It won’t result in a formal disciplinary warning, but it does mean your travel expenses will not be reimbursed. So, if you want your train fare and hotel costs paid back, please get the form sent in on time!

Right, are there any questions before we move on?

9 headteacher 10 60,000 11 50,000 12 writing

13 all day 14 cultural 15 imaginative

16 optimistic 17 government 18 second

Jane Robertson: Hello, my name’s Jane Robertson, and I’m here to talk to you about a language you may not have heard much about before: Gaelic. I work at a Gaelic school in Scotland – I’m the headteacher, in fact. There aren’t very many of these schools at the moment, so I’m lucky to have such an interesting job.

Maybe I should start by explaining exactly what Gaelic is. It’s a very old language that was spoken in most of Scotland, outside the cities, up to a couple of hundred years ago.

Today, unfortunately, very few people speak or even understand the language – only about 60,000 in the whole of Scotland. Now you may think that sounds like rather a large number of people, but the total population of Scotland is over 5 million. So you can see that the number of Gaelic speakers form a relatively small proportion of the population as a whole.

And according to experts, a language is dead if fewer than 50,000 people speak it. You see, you have to have a large number of people using the language in everyday situations, not just linguists or people who learn it as a hobby. It needs to be a normal part of a lot of ordinary people’s lives, or it simply doesn’t qualify.

So our aim is to get as many people as possible interested in learning it. And young people – those under 25 – are particularly important. I would like to see a third of them speaking and writing the language – then we could begin to say it was in a healthy state.

At my school all the teaching is in Gaelic, whatever subject the children are learning. This is very important, because it has been discovered that very young children learn a language best if they are completely exposed to it – hearing and speaking the language all day. Of course, it’s a bit of a shock for them at first, but we have some wonderful teachers, and they’re trained to cope with that!

Quite a lot of parents send their children to our school because they want their children to know about the history of the country – cultural reasons like that. But of course it’s also well known that it’s good for a child to grow up speaking two languages perfectly. And in fact, these children grow up to be bilingual. This gives them many advantages. It’s been scientifically proven that bilingual children do better at tests, and there’s reliable evidence that they’re also more tolerant and imaginative. In this case, an added advantage is that children of Scottish origin are rediscovering Scotland’s mother tongue.

Many people feel pessimistic about the future of Gaelic, and I can see why, when you look at the figures, it could appear that there’s little hope. But I myself am extremely optimistic.

In fact, when it comes to situations like this, there’s an example which is encouraging, and it’s quite close to home. Not that long ago, the Welsh language was in real danger of dying out. Some children may have grandparents who speak it as a first language, but in many parts of Wales it’s rare for kids to grow up speaking Welsh instead of English at home. However, with a lot of effort it’s been possible to save the Welsh language. The important thing is to have government support and enough money available. In Wales, virtually 80% of children now learn Welsh as a second language at school. It’s been a real success story and I hope that we’ll eventually be able to do the same in Scotland …