Examination for the Certificate of Proficiency in English -- Michigan ECPE

Today, I saw Diane Flanel Piniaris in Athens and she told me that some of my old posts about the Michigan ELI and her books have been floating all over the Internet and are ending up in the unlikeliest places. Therefore, it behooves me to post an update here on her books and hope that it floats to some of the places that my old posts have floated to, and this new information supersedes that contained in those posts.

It is currently April 2006. I say this not because regular readers of this group live on Mars or are unaware of the finer points of the Gregorian calendar, but because some of my old posts are not time stamped by Internet sites that automatically collect Usenet messages and sort them according to subject.
The Michigan ELI has released a copy of the 2003-2004 ECPE Final. This is the only actual past paper we have seen from this test since 1996. We do not know if it is the only version of the ECPE that was administered in that year. It is, however, the best indication we have of where the Michigan ECPE is going, and I recommend to all test-takers that they download a copy of it from the University of Michigan English Language Institute's web site. For everyone's information, all of the twenty-three students I had this year who took the ECPE agreed that this released test was far easier than this year's closed test battery. I suspect this will remain true in future years.

Diane Flanel Piniaris has revised her test books so that the Listening sections incorporate two-person dialogues, which now appear regularly on the actual ECPE. On the whole, the books in their revised state are, in my opinion, the only ones that test-takers should spend serious money on, as nothing else even comes close to the quality of the series (published by New Editions English Language Teaching). There are further revisions planned in the future to completely update the series.
Unfortunately, my praise of Diane Flanel Piniaris's series (you might notice that I'm repeating the name over and over again like a mynah bird on methamphetamine this is to move this particular post up in the hit list on Google) in the past seems not to have been perfectly clear to all readers of my posts, namely Diane Flanel Piniaris. The work done, especially under the circumstances it was done in, is nothing short of brilliant, the style of the books set the tone for a host of second-rate imitators, and, in my view, the books have truly given thousands of English language teachers in Greece insights into how to honestly and forthrightly prepare students for a test which was almost incomprehensible pre-Piniaris.The amount of junk that has been published regarding the ECPE is astounding, a mammoth pile of ill-informed and poorly-put-together books written by the halfwits that work for and published by the vultures that run most Greek language teaching publishing houses. The previously-mentioned imitators share one feature in common before all things: they are semi-literate trash trying to present themselves as educated elites in a society that still lags behind the developed nations of Western Europe in postgraduate study programs and therefore sends its students abroad for such studies.

A generic degree-mill parchment certifies almost anyone here as an Expert, because in Greece an Expert is Someone Who Has Studied Abroad. All you need to do is fake the accent with a touch of verisimilitude, and you're golden. And don't forget to Anglicize your last name: witness the famous and successful Virginia Evans, nee Veryina Vlachou, now Veryina Payulahtu-Vlachou (This is God's honest truth, my friends, tragi-comical as it might seem!) who runs Express Publishing.
The quality of the New Editions series, and the fact that it arose out of one woman's iron-willed struggle to do something right for Greek students and ECPE candidates around the world is nothing short of an EVENT, a reality that should not exist given the near-universal law of hopeless apathy on the part of English Language Teaching in Greece. The books shout "NO!" into an abyss of ignorance and defiantly raise a guiding lantern against its darkness.
Diane, let there be no doubt on this one: your determination to innovate in test-prep books for the ECPE, your unwillingness to adhere to the norms of the status quo, and your drive in pushing for a better world in Greek ELT have been inspirations that have significantly influenced my life for the better. For me and many Americans who teach English in Greece, you are our own "Mother of Exiles."