The Goalposts Keep Changing In The World Of Foreign Language Learning

The Goalposts Keep Changing

In the 70s there were no real TEFL materials for teaching English as a foreign language and ELT as a profession did not exist as such. We had typewriters, being a native speaker was sufficient and photocopiers were the size of elephants.

Milestones for Habil include:

Mid 80s : running Finland’s first certificate teacher training ITTI/RSA course. Today this is the CELTA or equivalent and employers are wide awake on this subject.

Early 90s : introducing a modular format to training which we developed for Finland’s accession to the EU.

Mid 90s : introducing TQM to the classroom

Late 90s : successfully delivering pre-Presidency training to a number of ministries and coming out as one of the top suppliers of language services in the University of Jyväskylä post training review of performance and results.

2000 onwards : Today’s economy is a knowledge economy and an information society. Language communication is the most important tool.