An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

6.1.5 Political factors
Political insights at the national level meant careful attention to issues such as test
exemptions. It was always accepted that a student from, say, New Zealand would not
be expected to sit the test on the grounds that New Zealand is an English-speaking
country. But whether the same dispensation applied to countries such as the West
Indies or India was an open question. And there were uncertainties too about blanket
exemption for countries such as New Zealand, since it was always possible that a
Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching 79
02 pages 001-202:Layout 1 31/5/07 09:31 Page 79

---

candidate from New Zealand (with New Zealand citizenship) might have been
educated in, say, Thailand and have used New Zealand only as a base for university
applications.
It was necessary, therefore, to consider the question of exemption carefully and to
recommend offering exemption not on the basis of nationality or provenance but on
the basis of individual educational history. Given the complicated history of English
medium education in the colonies and ex-colonies, this would not avoid all
objections but it was probably fairer than country-wide exemptions. An issue that
clearly needed addressing was whether all exemptions should be completely removed
so that everyone not schooled in the UK should be required to take the test.
Political sensitivity was also necessary on the more local scale, that is in terms of
the extent to which ELTS was in practice being used as a normative instrument.
Those whose applications were processed by the British Council were in two large
categories, British Council scholars whose admission depended on their satisfying
the Council’s own fairly strict guidelines, and other students who had gained
admission to a British university direct and whose English was being tested by the
British Council simply as an agent of the admitting university. The issue here was
whether the admitting university had any serious interest in the level of English of its
incoming students or whether it was ignoring the test results on the grounds that a
student would be able to pick up adequate English once admitted. More crudely in
such cases, it was not so much the English of an overseas student that mattered as the
fees they paid. Fees increasingly dominated UK university activities through the
1980s and 1990s, as market forces became more and more important.
6.1.6 Religious factors
Religious considerations were relevant only in so far as the test raised the kind of
religio-cultural concerns mentioned above in the section on the anthropological
factor. If the test was to be acceptable across all religious settings it was important
that it did not contain any material which might be offensive to one or other
religious group. In addition to the obvious avoidance of references to the deity and
to those closely associated it was also relevant to query any mention of those social
issues which are considered taboo in some religious contexts, matters to do with sex
and the family for example.
6.1.7 Economic factors
A cost-benefit analysis was necessary in order to determine whether the cost of the
test outweighed its usefulness. The test was expected to pay for itself, candidates were
charged a fee. But processing of the test in the receiving institutions was not paid
for and there were administrative costs that needed to be taken into account and
balanced against the costs of remedial English programmes in these institutions. The
fundamental question was whether there was any benefit to institutions in selection
based, in part, on present English proficiency; and this was influenced by the amount
80
An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
02 pages 001-202:Layout 1 31/5/07 09:31 Page 80

---

of reliability that could be placed on the test results. Even if they were 100 per cent
reliable, there would still be costs. But since no test has complete reliability, it became
necessary to compute, in financial terms as far as possible, what contribution a flawed
instrument made to the output of university overseas students. This is similar to the
questions discussed in medical reports on the proportion of False Positives to False
Negatives acceptable from the use of a new drug.
6.1.8 Business factors
This factor related closely to the previous one of economics. The ELTS test was
developed at a time when government money was still available for the monitoring
of overseas students. As this support was progessively withdrawn, it became clear that
ELTS would have to operate more and more as a business operation which would
sell its services to universities and other receiving institutions, as well as to test
candidates. It was also to be hoped that a future development would expand the test’s
use to universities outside the UK. And indeed that was what did happen: the
successor to ELTS, the International English Language Testing System (known as
IELTS) is a joint British-Australian operation. (The original plan was that Canada
would also participate, but that did not come about.)
6.1.9 Planning/policy (including the ethical) factors
A number of issues to do with planning and policy have already been mentioned and
will not be repeated. But there is an additional aspect which was emphasised in the
evaluation, and that was the need to plan the integration of the proficiency test with
the universities’ remedial programmes, so as to ensure that those false positives who
were admitted would be given proper attention. The evaluation of ELTS made clear
that a one-off proficiency test, often administered months before a student arrived in
the UK, was unsatisfactory and what was necessary was an integrated programme
of assessment and teaching, the assessment becoming increasingly diagnostic so as
to inform the remedial programmes. This type of integrated programme required
resources and these it was difficult to argue for in a climate of reduced resources.
Here there was also the ethical factor to consider in that overseas students who
were increasingly being charged larger and larger direct fees for tuition were not
necessarily being given the kind of English support (including assessment) they could
properly expect to receive. From the point of view of assessment, it has been
interesting to observe how those involved in this field have in recent years become
more and more concerned about the ethics of their activity. We shall come back to
this issue in Chapter 6.
6.1.10 Linguistic and phonetic factors
We have already considered some of the linguistic aspects under educational and the
sociology/sociolinguistic, above. But there is an even more central linguistic aspect
Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching 81
02 pages 001-202:Layout 1 31/5/07 09:31 Page 81

---

and that is the issue of sampling. Like any proficiency test, ELTS is meant to
represent the language: those whose results indicate satisfactory proficiency are
deemed to possess enough English for their study. This is a very large assumption.
No proficiency test is likely to take up more than, say, three hours of test time and
yet that test is expected to predict whether a student can cope with a year or three
years’ study, including very complex spoken and written material.
It was also assumed in the non-specialist components of the ELTS test that a
proficiency test should target language use in the community, on the reasonable
grounds that a student who coped easily with English communication in life outside
the university, interacting with other students, communicating in the local shops,
solving accommodation problems, seeking medical attention, going to the cinema,
managing an English-speaking daily life, would be more likely to succeed in his/her
studies. These are all large demands from a test. What this means is that the samples
of English use that are put into the test must be very carefully chosen on the basis of
their normality and frequency within the language. Anything odd or idiosyncratic,
or even jokey, is best omitted. Judgements of the samples in the ELTS test required
careful analysis on the basis of linguistic knowledge of the English language, the
kind of analysis that is necessary for selecting the materials contained in a pedagogic
grammar.
In addition, judgements were necessary of the spoken component of the test.
These in part related to the voices used for the listening sections and in part to the
ways in which the students’ own speaking was measured, how far the question of
intelligibility was raised, and of course intelligibility to whom. Just as the touchstone
for the written materials in the test was the standard language, so the question which
raised itself with regard to the spoken components of ELTS was what sort of norms
should be applied to the judgements made of the candidates’ own speech. To this
extent the language problem which led to the evaluation of ELTS was indeed a prob -
lem involving language as much as it involved the other factors to which we have
drawn attention.