TESTIMONIALS: “A big thank you for the awesome training. Liz and I both enjoyed it very much. It was useful, relevant and has given us both a firm foundation from which we can develop out own testing protocol for our team”. Cassandra - UAE "I highly recommend to any Contracting State under their Civil Authority or User (Airline /Company ) to consider wisely sending their air traffic controllers, pilots, teacher , trainers and raters to study at Mayflower College because of their professional educational staff , excellent program structure and coordination , hospitality and most of all their expertise on the Aviation Language Issue". Sergio Alzamora - Panama "Mayflower College is one of a few colleges providing courses for raters. Since it is a new field in Aviation English it needs hard job. The courses we attended were conducted with high professionalism. All the teachers were enthusiastic, sympathetic, intelligent and we highly appreciate their desire to share their great knowledge with those who studied." Galina Nekrasova / Larisa Bragina - Uzbekistan "To my mind, the courses were really exactly the thing all Aviation Teachers need. Because, I am sure it's next to impossible to upgrade somebody's English Proficiency level without the appropriate knowledge of ICAO rating Scale. Another thing is that anyone may feel more confident in their students' benchmarking or licensing taking the courses in Mayflower College. Moreover, the Tutors were incredibly fast-thinking, really experienced and wise, tactful and inventive. Any experienced teacher knows for sure how difficult is to train grown-ups. And it's much more a complicated task to train self-assured, ambitious and sometimes overconfident teachers and top-managers. Our instructors managed to cope with this special task brilliantly and really pushed more bright ideas and knowledge into my exhausted head. As for all the administrative issues, I mean, schedule, accommodation, transportation, excursions and so on, everything was arranged with the best comfort. I didn't have a feeling to have come to an unfamiliar place. Plymouth itself is full of history and charm. The wind from the sea is really a challenge for anyone to fall in love with this land of rains and fogs, calmness and remarkable country-side, friendly and hospitable people. It was my first trip to Great Britain and it was really great to see the country that a lot of people could just dream about. Besides, it was absolutely necessary to share the experience of Aviation English teaching with the colleagues from Great Britain and other countries. Now I am able to inspire my younger colleagues in developing teaching materials, programmes and other tasks to help flight crews and air-traffic controllers reach Level 4 in line with new ICAO English Proficiency . Tamara Furenkova - Russia "We wish to express our deep appreciation and thanks to the teaching staff and Paul Stevens, the director of Mayflower College, Plymouth, for all hard work they had done for us. The training programme for aviation language instructors was perfectly developed to meet all our requirements and special needs. It was real pleasure to be taught and trained by the highly qualified language teachers who did an enormous amount of work in order to encourage enjoyable and productive learning. It was even greater pleasure to see that all the teachers were fully committed to continuous professional development and were ready constantly to search for answers to our unexpected questions." Elena Lissitsyna, Russia "There aren't many occasions for exchanging experience in applying and interpreting ICAO rating scale. In the form as it is, with descriptors based mainly on adverbs of frequency, it's terribly difficult to be absolutely sure where 'sometimes' ends and 'rarely' can be applied ( is it still level 4 or 5 already?), or how to differentiate 'sometimes immediate responses' from 'usually immediate responses' (level 3 or 4). Thus the course you offer in Plymouth, in a form of a workshop, provides rare occasion for constructive discussion on any diversities occurring in interpretation of the scale, practical exercises in applying the scale for marking the speech samples as well as, and what I find most important, calibration of the future raters coming from different backgrounds". Magda Zalewska – Poland