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FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION Background Anthropological factors (for insights on cultural matters)

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P79-C4

2026-07-24

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FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION

Background

Anthropological factors (for insights on cultural matters)

Since the ELTS test was being used throughout the world and therefore open to scrutiny across cultures it was important to examine whether any of its content could be thought offensive.

Medicine, for example, might be regarded as neutral in this regard since the whole point of overseas students attending medical courses in the UK was (presumably) to learn Western medicine. But in the West itself there is disagreement as to what should be studied and what is legitimate medical practice. There are severe differences of opinion among those involved in medicine about such topics as abortion and euthanasia. In some countries, mention of contraception is unacceptable and should probably be avoided in such a widely used test.

The attitude that if these students actually come to the UK to study they will not be able to escape from discussions about contraception as well as medical explanations of its uses and patients’ enquiries about its efficacy, these are all true but not the point. Culture is context bound and what the test must try to achieve is a judicious balance between a valid sampling of what students in a particular discipline need to do once started on a UK university course and an avoidance of giving offence to the students and their home communities. This may be censorship but it is sensitive self-censorship since it recognizes local norms and does not try to change them. If that is thought to be desirable, then the ELTS test is not its vehicle.

Another use of anthropological skills is in the exercise of ethnographic techniques in researching how students study in a foreign language medium and the extent to which they do so in distinct ways. Evidence from this type of study is confirmatory or not of the test scores and may show that what the test is testing is not exactly (perhaps not even remotely) what the students themselves know and are capable of. This is another approach to the issue of test validity.