Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching
FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION
Background
Language testing reaches into many if not most applied linguistic activities. Assessment is central to all institutional language activities where there is frequently appeal to a language standard or norm.
The language problem to which this testing project belongs is that of the educability of tertiary students in a non-native language medium. The students in question were overseas or foreign students aiming to study at British universities. The problem arose because a number of such students had been found part-way through their studies to have inadequate English to proceed to a satisfactory conclusion and so graduate at either the undergraduate or more usually the postgraduate level.
The organization where this issue became an institutional language problem was the UK para-statal British Council, a non-governmental body entrusted with the task of allocating scholarships and so on to selected students in a variety of disciplines wishing to attend British universities. Subjective judgements by its officers as to whether a prospective student’s English was adequate had been found to be unreliable. English proficiency tests had been commissioned, the first used until the late 1970s (Davies 1965) and the second operational in the early part of the 1980s. This second test, known as the English Language Testing System (ELTS) test, had been designed in response to the push from the communicative movement to communicative language teaching and in consequence communicative language testing, and had based itself on the need for specificity in advanced language assessment.
What in practice that meant was that those students wishing to study a life science, such as biology, would be tested on materials (in English) drawn in part from the life sciences area. Similarly, those students wishing to study engineering would be tested on materials drawn from the technology area. There were six of these specialist areas, enough it was thought to cover the needs of most prospective students. This ELTS test was used widely in the early 1980s, administered through the British Council in some eighty different countries. It was noticeable that the comparable American test (Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL), which had been in use unchanged since the mid-1960s, made no concession to ways in which different contexts influence language use.
By the mid-1980s it had come to be felt that ELTS was unnecessarily com plicated. Its very specificity caused more problems than it solved since it was by no means clear to prospective candidates (or their teachers, British Council officials and so on) which special module of ELTS they should take since they might well be in the process of moving from one specialism to another between the undergraduate and the graduate level: should they seek to be tested in the area of their previous study or in their future study area?
Again, the promise of specificity was open to complaint since in any one area (e.g. the life sciences) the range of topic and specialist language was so huge that what was clear to one biologist might well be opaque to another, making the text under test as difficult for him/her as for someone from, say, social studies. One consequence was that in order to avoid overspecialization within the specialist area, test constructors aimed at generality, which inevitably made the texts they chose less and less specific. As a result, the chosen texts could become so general as to lose all trace of the very specificity they were supposed to contain. Perhaps this meant that the whole notion of a specific test should be abandoned and a return made to the situation in which TOEFL (and the previous British Council test) had originated, that is a general test of English proficiency, the same test of ‘academic’ English for everyone.
The language problem presented by the British Council to its applied linguistics consultants in the mid-1980s was what to do about the ELTS test. Should it remain in use as it was, should it be revised, should it be rewritten? An evaluation was needed, drawing on as wide a range of information as possible.
The detailed investigation of ELTS then carried out is described below; and in order to clarify its relevance to our discussion of the enterprise of applied linguistics, I record my discussion under the various heads or factors we have already noted.
