As the Global Scale of English celebrates its 10-year anniversary, Mike Mayor, Senior Director for the GSE, reflects on its impact and considers how it can continue to support our teaching efforts in the future.
As ELT teachers, we’re always looking for ways to make learning more accessible and engaging for our students. The Global Scale of English (GSE), introduced by Pearson a decade ago, was developed by teachers for teachers and offers a framework and proficiency scale designed to enhance and support language learning, teaching, and assessment.
The origins and purpose of the GSE
The GSE was originally developed to address some of the limitations of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
While the CEFR had been a vital tool for measuring language proficiency since 2001, it was starting to be used in contexts for which it had not been designed, for example in non-European countries or with younger learners.
Additionally, its broad proficiency levels (A1-C2) did not lend themselves easily to the measurement of learner progress on a regular basis, with learners apparently plateauing at the same CEFR level for many years. With the GSE, we saw an opportunity to extend the CEFR and develop tools that would support teachers in their day-to-day teaching and assessment of English.
GSE’s detailed learning objectives
What makes the GSE particularly useful for day-to-day teaching and progress monitoring is its emphasis on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) objectives.
In its introduction, the CEFR tells teachers that they will have to adapt the ‘Can Do’ statements to their own particular context, including breaking them down into the shorter-term objectives that serve as lesson level goals. The GSE Learning Objectives have done much of this work for teachers, providing ready-to-use lesson objectives that have been validated by thousands of teachers around the world.
These shorter-term, measurable goals help students and teachers track progress more effectively and enable educators to keep learners motivated by acknowledging success on a more frequent basis.
Practical tools for teachers
One of the key goals when developing the GSE was to create tools and resources that would be easy for educators to use in their day-to-day teaching. The GSE Toolkit— a free, online searchable database—provides access to all the GSE’s learning objectives, along with levelled databases for grammar and vocabulary.
It’s designed to be user friendly and help teachers plan lessons, set goals, and develop activities that align with their students’ needs. Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or just starting out, the GSE offers practical support for lesson planning and assessment.
Tracking progress and keeping motivation high
We know that mastering a language takes many years and one of the major challenges for teachers is keeping students motivated for the long haul.
Many learners feel discouraged when they don’t feel like they are improving, and we need to provide tangible evidence of progress and celebrate success on a regular basis. The GSE can support you in addressing this issue.
Many GSE Learning Objectives include ‘scaffolding’; the support needed before a particular language function can be mastered independently. For example: ‘Can give simple reasons to explain preferences, given a model.’
By having this type of learning objective, we are able to celebrate success (mastery of the scaffolded learning objective) along the way to being able to do something independently.
Using the numerical scale, we are also able to show progress within a CEFR level, giving learners an indication of where they are in, for example, B1 and demonstrating that they are steadily moving to B2.
GSE 44 (B1), GSE 47 (B1), GSE 50 (B1); without the GSE level, it would appear that this learner is at the same B1 level for each assessment. They are not, but if your next point of reference is B2, how do you show progress?
Final thoughts
The GSE is far from a finished product. We continue to expand and innovate the frameworks, keeping them relevant in a rapidly changing educational landscape.
Recent developments include the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the GSE ecosystem, allowing for even more personalised learning experiences for students.
For EFL teachers, the Global Scale of English represents a valuable resource that goes beyond traditional language frameworks. By offering a detailed, flexible, and practical set of tools, the GSE helps teachers provide more effective teaching and better support for their students on the language learning journey.
Whether you’re teaching young learners, adults, or professionals, the GSE equips you with the resources to make learning more measurable, motivating, and achievable. To find out more about the GSE, read the full report here.
This article was originally published in the March/April issue of EL Gazette.
