The IELTS roller coaster: Stories of hope, stress, success, and despair

Abstract

This chapter discusses how a narrative approach can be used to investigate the key constructs of language, culture, identity, and learner beliefs about English language testing. With the globalisation of English and its spread in use, there is a need for a reliable means of assessing English language proficiency. Governments, employers, professional bodies, and educational institutions rely on large-scale international tests to provide them with English language proficiency information. The chapter features participants preparing to take the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), a high-stakes test of English language proficiency largely taken for the purposes of immigration and entry into tertiary academic institutions. The specific methodological issue that this chapter explores is how to frame the stories of language learners. We draw on Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) model of the three dimensions (temporality, sociality and place) which provide the context for a story. To capture these dimensions, details of the candidates’ life history, interaction with IELTS testing and their story ‘after’ IELTS are specifically written in to their stories, as are the relational and social contexts and the places. We also use Barkhuizen’s (2008) model of interconnected stories (from individual to broader contexts) to frame analysis of the data. Our framework choices allowed us as researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the varied reasons that language learners may have for wanting to acquire and use a new language, from personal or family reasons to social, economic or political reasons, and provided a way to capture the participants’ experience of the phenomenon of IELTS test candidacy. They also facilitated the analysis of micro stories of individuals in the context of their wider resonance on a macro or societal level.