• Quality as client satisfaction – to be achieved by analysing “clients” needs and wishes, and planning and implementing teaching / learning activities which meet these needs. The notion of client in education is a complex one as it includes “direct” clients (the learners in the classroom) and other stakeholders (parents, employers, universities etc.)
• Quality as a process – delivering language courses can be seen as a set of processes – a connected chain from needs analysis, general setting of curriculum aims, defining syllabus, planning lessons etc. There are similar sets of processes in evaluation procedures and in developing resources. Quality involves getting every step of the process “right”
• Quality based on results – the quality of language teaching must also judge the efficiency of the process – how much language is learned? Is there satisfactory added value in the learning process? The difficulty of a pure results based assessment of quality is examined.
• Quality based on values – education is not a commercial enterprise and it is important to define underlying values – such as the promotion of mutual respect and tolerance – in order to assess its quality.

The Guide prompts readers to explore these principles, all of which need to be included in an overall approach to quality, and to reflect on how they can be applied in their own contexts. To illustrate how changes in the professional environment impact on the way the principles are applied, there is a description of how the development of the Common European Framework of Reference, and its implementation, has affected language education. The second part of the Unit presents some of the basic concepts related to quality assurance; how do we establish criteria and use these to set standards? What indicators can we use to find out if we are achieving quality? How can benchmarking help us in this work? Again the concepts are applied to the readers’ own environment.

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Quality Principles and Basic Concepts