British Council-The BULATS exam
Transcript of the podcast
Interviewer: First Certificate, Advanced, Proficiency, Trinity and IELTS – there is no shortage of English language qualifications on the market at the moment if you need a certificate to impress an employer or enrich your CV.But now there’s yet another one – BULATS. Mark Cohen, who is training manager with a large international banking group, has just introduced the BULATS exam as part of the corporate training programme in his organisation.So, Mark, two questions to kick off with, first why another exam? And secondly, why BULATS
Mark Cohen: Well, first of all let me say that I’m lucky in that I work for a company who invest a lot in training – and we see language training as an essential part of that. We have offices in over two dozen countries worldwide, so obviously our staff use a lot of different languages – not to mention our external clients! We do a lot of language training, and the exams you mention are all fine in their place, but they’re not really what we’re looking for
Interviewer: How do you mean
Mark Cohen: All they do is show that you have achieved a certain level
Interviewer: And what are you looking for
Mark Cohen: Well – this is where BULATS comes in – what we need to find out is not the language level of the people who work for us, but their ability to speak that language.And it is exactly this that the BULATS exam tests. It not only evaluates their skills, but also lets us look at their suitability for further language training, and helps us to decide exactly what kind of training is necessary
Interviewer: And you then design language training based directly on their needs
Mark Cohen: Exactly – we work with a group of language trainers who design materials and sessions specifically to meet our corporate needs, and also the needs of the people who take the courses – helping to maximise our resources
Interviewer: So far so good – but why the necessity for the exam? Why not just do the courses straight away
Mark Cohen: Well, we’ve done language courses before and they’ve never achieved quite what we want. We even had an extensive programme of sending trainees to the UK to do languages courses – they all had a great time, but to be honest the results didn’t really meet our corporate objectives
Interviewer: And BULATS helps you to do this
Mark Cohen: Yes, I have to say – it’s proved pretty successful so far. We’ve given trainees the BULATS exam at both the beginning and at the end of the language courses they’ve followed – it allows us to accurately measure their progress, and the efficiency of the training they underwent
Interviewer: How do you manage to fit an exam into busy working schedules
Mark Cohen: BULATS has proved very easy to administer – we can do it at any time, unlike the other exams which you mentioned, when they can only take them twice a year, which would mean a lot of delays – not useful in a fastmoving business like ours
Interviewer: Is it only for English language training
Mark Cohen: No we don’t just use the English language version. As I said before, we work in lots of different countries, so our staff have to be able to speak more than just English – the BULATS test can also be done for French, German and Spanish– all highly useful languages in our corporate environment
Interviewer: Mark, thanks for your time
Answers
| True or False | sentence |
| F | According to the presenter, there aren’t many English language exams to do at the moment |
| T | According to the presenter, a language qualification can make your CV look better |
| T | Mark Cohen’s company think training is important |
| F | Cohen’s company only uses English as a language |
| F | Cohen thinks existing language exams meet his needs perfectly |
| T | Cohen does not need to know the language level of people in his company |
| T | Cohen has other people design courses specifically for his company |
| T | Using BULATS and designing specific courses works out cheaper for Cohen’s company |
| F | Sending Cohen’s trainees to the UK for a language course was a success |
| T | BULATS can be taken at any time of the year |
| F | BULATS is only for English |
