The greatest misconception in TESOL?

“Native-Japanese speakers taking the paper-based Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, scored lower than students from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, South Korea and Vietnam in 2007. Even North Koreans scored higher.”

From the famous Japan analyst William Pissant.

To which my reply is-

and????? Surely no one thinks that the average North Korean speaks better than the average Japanese?? And if not, what would be the reason for throwing around the meaningless statistic??

Let me spell this out for the world one more time- if Japanese people who take the TOEFL or TOEIC get lower marks than in other countries the only thing that proves is that lots of Pre-Intermediate (for example) Japanese choose to or are forced to take the tests, whereas in other countries such students tend to avoid it more. It proves nothing about the level of Japanese students one way or the other. To take it to mean that would be like taking the weight of people in fat clubs in various countries as proof of the average weight of the whole population.

Right, I hope I’ve cleared that one up. If I hear this one more time, I’ll be setting BBC Statistics radio programme (much more interesting than it sounds!) More or Less on you…

Talking of misconceptions, I’ve just published 15 Common Misconceptions about Business English and ESP on TEFL.net Articles.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 11:51 amand is filed under Business English and ESP, EFL exams, TEFL.net, TOEFL, Teaching English in Japan. 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.