SURVEY OF TESTS IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

None of the above tests fully meets the need for a linguistically valid English examination that may be administered abroad by untrained personnel who are busy with other duties. Those tests that come close to sound construction require the full attention of the examiner for varying lengths of time, or they require the use of records and phonographs that may or may not be available. Since considerable time and money have been spent on the preparation of these tests without attaining the desired goals, it seems appropriate to look at the difficulties in the hope of finding a practical solution. Following are some of the major obstacles and their possible solutions. 1. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to progress in these tests is the lack of a clear understanding of what English language is. As a result the approach to test making, except in the case of vocabulary, is a haphazard, almost mystic attempt to capture in a paragraph or a story what a foreign student has to know to attend our colleges. To overcome this difficulty we must first realize that what we need to test is how well the student uses and reacts to the meaningful signals that constitute the English language. The matter of how good a student he is, or how well he is going to do in engineering mechanics, for example, can be determined by his previous academic work in his own language; for that purpose he submits his academic records to the admitting institution. Once we concentrate on testing his control of the signals of the language itself we will make progress provided also that we base our tests on a scientific linguistic analysis of English. 2. Failure to make distinctions in the linguistic problems found by the various groups of foreign students is a weakness of many of the above tests, and yet the task of preparing separate tests for all language backgrounds is so enormous that we may never hope to have such tests except for a limited few languages. A practical solution to this problem may be that of keeping separate norms for the various national groups of students that take the tests. 3. A final roadblock to progress on a practical test for foreign students has been and is the need to test at least one aural skill, aural comprehension, which requires the use of records and phonographs. We do not have enough information on the correlation of aural comprehension with other language skills that can be measured more easily than aural comprehension. There is some hope that substitutions can be made without serious loss of validity. © 1950 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan