Accommodation or Aggravation?…

Tomorrow morning, James will be assessed on his oral skills in French… Am I nervous?… Of course I am!!!… Who would not be given the circumstances?… Since he will not be allowed to resume training after his test, I do cross my fingers for him to get his B… otherwise he will have to be re-tested and, without any further regular practice, chances are he will not improve.

I think I do know now why he failed the first time… I talked many times about how James’ brain is functioning… which has nothing to do with his abilities in French!

If most of us do not dig deeply into each and every question we are asked, James does on a regular basis… in both English and French. He is the kind of individual who wants to make sure he understands questions perfectly… therefore he systematically asks for clarifications… It is not something a French teacher can modify, trust me! I did try but… I failed miserably… I think it would take years to change James’ way of processing information. One question remains though: should something like that be considered as some kind of dislexia?… and therefore, someone like James could ask for special accommodation?

Since every single day of my professional life I bump into people who under’went second language training and took SLE tests (often more than once!), it is not surprising that I learn about lots of stuff that, normally, I would never come across.

Not long ago, I casually met with someone who had requested accommodation for their oral tests… being curious, I asked what kind of accommation was provided… and why it had taken more than six months before they went for testing. After I got my answer, I really wondered why there had been such a long delay between the request and the actual testing… probably because of some legendary red tape administration and useless paperwork… anyways…

The problem was an auditive problem… the candidate, although wearing hearing aids, had asked to be allowed to ask the assessor to repeat the questions in order to make sure that not one word would be missed. Of course, my first reaction was “Why did you need to be accommodated for something that is allowed and supposedly does not penalize candidates?” I have to admit I was flabbergasted by the answer… Apparently, candidates cannot ask to repeat questions more than twice!!! I did not remember having read anything like that in the information kit provided prior to the test… however I do remember having read that asking for another question or for repeating it would not penalize the candidate.

Of course, this conversation m’a mis la puce à l’oreille and I had to do research in order to find the document in which it is clearly stated that candidates cannot ask the assessor to repeat questions more than twice (actually I cannot even tell if this rule applies to one single question or to the overall test!)…

I finally found a document on the PSC website, under PPC… Here is what I read on the topic:

Can I ask the assessor to repeat a question?

Yes you may ask the assessor to repeat or reformulate a question which you did not understand. You will not be penalized unless this happens repeatedly. This would indicate a weakness in oral comprehension.

Does it sound clear to you?… Are they talking about doing it repeatedly with one single question or with many questions during the course of the interview? Also… repeatedly refers to something that is said or done many times regularly until it gets boring… I have not seen anything stating that after twice, it becomes automatically repetitive… If it is the case in the PPC’s eyes, why do they not say it clearly in plain English? “(…) unless this happens more than twice.” Because the adverb repeatedly is subject to interpretation… and it should also be clear whether they are talking about one question or about all the questions during the course of the evaluation.

Now I am sure that James failed the first time precisely because of that… he certainly did what he does all the time… Alice had some hard time with a couple of questions and perhaps she asked for the questions to be repeated more than twice… Would Susan and Jay have failed based upon the same criterias?… Real good question indeed!

I just do not get it!… why everything is not simply said so that no one will be misled by the PPC documents regarding SLE? Is it done on purpose or is it done only because people do not know how to communicate messages in writing? If so… their employer should provide them with some Business Writing Workshops… so they would learn how to write in a manner that messages are comprehensible and not open to individual/personal interpretation! I would be more than willing and enchanted to teach them such essential skills…

“Parlez doucement et tenez un gros bâton, vous irez loin.”

Theodore Roosevelt