The British government learns what any TEFLer could have told them
…ETS is crap! I mean really, you’d only need to look at one TOEIC test, an exam that claims to test all skills but has no speaking component, or its history to see that ETS is a company that has turned educational incompetence linked to juicy undeserved government contracts into an art form.
The moral of the story is obviously that governments everywhere need to employ more people with TEFL experience to stop them making such elementary mistakes. It’s a big, bad world out there, and no one knows that better than a TEFL teacher!
Tags: News
July 26th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Talk about making an “elementary mistake”!
Maybe before you start criticizing an exam, any exam, you should at least read the promotional material, or talk to someone who has seen it.
The are two major TOEIC exams, one is a Listening & Reading exam and the other a Speaking & Writing exam. The TOEIC Listening & Reading exam has never claimed to measure any skills other than Listening or Reading.
So maybe the real moral to the story is that before running out and employing more people with TEFL experience, the government need to find people who know what they are talking about.
If you can’t get the basic facts right, why should anyone pay attention to anything else you have to say about ETS?
July 26th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Never?
TOEIC is one of many things in life that you cannot understand without an understanding of history. How long has TOEIC had a speaking component and how many people take it?
July 26th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Live by the sword, die by the feather, Alex. They’re all turning against you now.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:33 am
And what history is it that I need to understanding. Sorry, but that is a pretty presumptuous statement.
All I am saying is that if your are going to criticize something, learn the facts first. Minimally go to the ETS website and look the information up before you pontificate.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Let’s start with an absolute irrefutable basic- the name. It’s the Test of English for International COMMUNICATION. And because it was supposed to be communicative is why it was taken on by the Japanese as a way of creating business men who could communicate, i.e. write and speak, in English. But the students do not communicate in the exam, and it remains a barrier to spending sufficient time doing those things in TOEIC classes, i.e. it has had precisely the opposite effect. All the rumours about the updated TOEIC exam is that it was a response to precisely that result- that there are people with good English with bad TOEIC scores and people with good TOEIC scores who can’t communicate. That is why they introduced an obligatory speaking test for every student.
…only joking (that’s IELTS, FCE etc), they just put in some longer listenings and a couple of Australian accents!
I don’t know what your connection to ETS is Mr Bottoms, but I have yet to meet anyone in ELT who has a good thing to say about TOEIC, including people who write TOEIC exam questions and TOEIC textbooks. For exactly the same reasons, TOEFL is rapidly losing ground to a test that shows students can speak and write before they try to join a foreign university. For these and other reasons, if the British government had asked me if ETS was a good choice, I could have advised them to run a mile. And the recent evidence proves that I would have been right.
July 28th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Here are some links I came across while trying to find something positive about ETS:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/ets_exams_online_marking/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jul/18/schools.uk1
http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/education/entries/2008/07/18/ets_test_scorin.html
http://www.urch.com/forums/graduate-admissions/35298-ets-woes.html
http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2007/04/04/Opinion/Gre-Changes-2822622.shtml
http://www.tes.co.uk/section/staffroom/thread.aspx?story_id=2618073&path=/Opinion/&threadPage=&messagePage=1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/oct/20/tefl2
http://www.urch.com/forums/lounge/3889-new-forum-just-ets-problems.html
And in response to the idea that bloggers are negative, here is something positive:
IELTS is a very good test indeed
July 29th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
TOEIC Speaking and Writing was introduced back in Dec 2006. It’s just now coming to the UK. It was originally put out in the test’s largest market, Japan and Korea, then expanded to the USA and now the UK.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:21 am
Stick at it, Alex. You know it makes sense! ToEFL and all its variants has ALWAYS been a crap indicator of English language ability, whereas IELTS and the Cambridge exams have always been streets ahead. Not perfect, mind you, but in no way as flawed as the dogshite tests that ToEFL churn out!
February 6th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Everything Alex has said about TOEFL is true – he just doesn’t go far enough – the test is beyond crap!
In Korea we have TOEIC Gurus who have passed the test more than 20 times consecutively with a perfect score. When I asked one of them how that is possible they told me that there are no or few new questions, or new question types. You can learn how to master the test through memorisation of past paper answers and that is what people here do.
As for the TOEIC Speaking and Writing, perhaps Mr Bottoms can give us some figures. Here in Korea I have never met a student who has taken it. My Korean co-workers who teach TOEIC tell me it has been largely ignored and that effectively ETS has been complicit in the Korean government’s failure to address the students’ need to communicate. Much easier to pass a non-communicative test with memorisation techniques…
Here in Korea, the TEPS exam is the new kid on the block. It has been designed by Seoul National University. I thought the plan was surely to address the weaknesses of TOEIC but I have since discovered it’s actually just to avoid paying for TOEIC in hopes of replacing it.
As everyone should know, IELTS is by far the best English language test of any type available for Korean and Japanese students, the result of which is a far, far better indicator of a candidate’s ability to handle an English-speaking university.
The problem is, you need native speaker teachers for IELTS and that impacts on its potential as a cash cow for private schools and other institutions in Korea.
February 6th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Please substitute TOEFL for TOEIC in my rant above. Oops! Isn’t there a way to edit these posts…
February 7th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Nope, but it’s all true of both of them anyway