The truth about TOEFL

“TOEFL- Test of English with Fluency Lacking- A test of English in which you can get full marks without speaking one word. Originally developed only for people who have physical problems with their voice box, eventually having been through an East Asian education system was accepted as a disability and it soon became one of the leading tests in Japan, China and Korea”

Okay, that isn’t really the truth about TOEFL, that is just the Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary definition. However, I have indeed found a link to real newspaper backing up everything I have been saying about the stupidity of using TOEFL scores to judge a country’s progress in English or compare it to other countries. A big round of applause for the author of this article in the Taipei Times. The fact that the article had to be written due to inane comments on the topic by the President of the country, no less, is not such an encouraging sign, but we have to take good sense on the topic of language and celebrate whenever we can! And you thought this post title just meant I was going to slag off ETS again…

Tags: News

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under EFL exams, ETS, links, Teaching English in Asia, Teaching English in China, Teaching English in Japan, Teaching English in Korea, Teaching English in Taiwan, TOEFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.