IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher educationOne critique of language tests was that similar (IELTS) scores reflected inconsistent language skilllevels among students and the academics who argued this felt that this was more than just an issue ofdifferent scores on different sub-tests - one lecturer, for example, referred to the range of proficiencyalso varying across the sub-skills of speaking and writing. Students with the same scores whowere well above the minimum entry into the relevant courses were still perceived to have markeddifferences between them. There was an expectation, then, among these academics that similar scoresare meant to reflect reasonably consistent abilities and that this was not necessarily the case. In termsof fitness for purpose, however, an opposing view was:As far as I know, IELTS is the best English language proficiency test that has been developed…I am an examiner of speaking and writing; the written test is quite useful for knowing how wellinternational student-teachers might cope with academic studies. Even the General English test helpsto see how well they’ll cope with writing and reading. The speaking test is as good as it could be forthat kind of test that has to be done in that limited time. It’s quite informative. The IELTS test in itselfdoes tell us quite a bit.7.2.2 Student competenceThere was disagreement among academics about where they felt LBOTE students’ problemsmanifested. Academics in one Faculty felt that students’ general oral ability was often better than theirwritten ability and problems therefore did not manifest in conversation. The students, they felt, couldfunction conversationally but needed to be able to read, write and understand nuance, which theycould not necessarily do at a level appropriate to their (Master’s) degree. Others, however, argued that:The main issue for (LBOTE students) in terms of communication is speaking and to some extentlistening. The reading and writing is pretty good especially at the pre-service level; they can doassignments. They can write a very nice essay [but there] is no guarantee that they are able to engagein verbal communication - conversations about the content… writing a piece of academic work; that is the benchmark for having a place in a particularcourse. At the Master’s level there is so much emphasis on the writing of the assignmentsrather than participating at the classroom level. What do we do with these students? Shouldwe not enrol international students who are interested in one of our Master’s degrees justbecause they are not able to speak well? I am also not very sure that we should be stopping(international) students from enrolling in our courses because they are not able to speak aswell as they are able to read and write… Of course associated with that is how… we test thespeaking given the number of applicants that we may have.Even comment on specific skills – such as speaking – needs to be nuanced, with groups of academicsdistinguishing between students’ skills in private conversation and their public speaking, such asin tutorial presentations. These academics were arguing that when it came to academic discourse,LBOTE students in their courses became very visible. One academic summed up the issuescomplicating the performance of spoken language in practicum classrooms in terms which againsuggested the need for occupation-specific skills:… international students need to have skills that are strong enough to be able to re-formulateideas in more than one way, and to be grammatically accurate enough to get the messageacross very easily… (Pupils) ask questions in ungrammatical ways… Students really need tobe able to speak well enough in posing questions and they need to understand when (pupils)are asking questions even if they’re making statements. So the listening and speaking skillsIELTS Research Reports Volume 11105