An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

6 FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION
In this next section of this chapter, I examine in detail an applied linguistic project
in the field of language testing so as to clarify further the factors taken into account,
the sources of knowledge appealed to, the skills drawn on and the stages followed.
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Necessarily, this project has its own particular features and will therefore be typical
only in some aspects of projects undertaken by applied linguists. Following this
examination, and to conclude the chapter, I consider the methodology used by the
applied linguist in operating on a problem and to that end I take as examples four
areas of importance in language teaching, second-language acquisition, proficiency
language testing, the teaching of languages for specific purposes and curriculum
design.
6.1 Background
Language testing reaches into many if not most applied linguistic activities. Assess -
ment 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 organisation 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 un -
reliable. 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 communi -
cative 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
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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 overspecialisation 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 (Alderson and
Urquhart 1985, discussed in Chapter 2 above).
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 (Criper and Davies 1988 and see Davies 2006
for a recent overview) 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.