IELTS Research Reports

Introductionmore appropriate for longer courses which offer students more time to develop the critical languageskills they need to embark on their professional career. The researchers are cautious, nonetheless, andavoid presenting this as a simple solution. Of course setting higher IELTS scores is unlikely to addressthe issue of familiarisation with the local schooling culture facing international students wishing totrain as teachers; such acculturation can really only be addressed during the course itself. To addressthis angle Sawyer and Singh note the value of post-entry support programs with both a linguistic anda cultural focus. Their findings reinforce the view that language proficiency alone is no guarantee ofeither academic success or failure and their study provides further empirical evidence of the complexfactors that interact in teacher education as in any other academic discipline or professional domain,arguing for a richer screening regime for applicants. It is clearly unreasonable and unwise to lay a burdenof expectation on IELTS scores as an entry requirement beyond what the test is capable of delivering(that is, a measure of English language proficiency), and the IELTS partners continue to recommendthat stakeholders take note, where possible, of additional sources of evidence alongside IELTS scoreswhen making selection decisions, e.g. through interviews, or an in-house, subject-specific diagnosticinstrument. However attractive the notion may be, it is unlikely that the IELTS partners could create ateacher-education-specific version of IELTS as suggested by the researchers, with varying course-entryand exit components; as discussed above, technical issues combined with matters of practicality andfairness continue to mitigate against the development of specific IELTS versions to match the multipledomains of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, teacher education, etc.One particularly useful outcome of this study is the inventory it offers of the English language skillsneeded by teachers, drawn from the available literature on teacher education; to these can be added theadditional language skills identified by respondents in the study as being needed by teachers operatingin English as a second or other language, including the need to become familiar with colloquial idiomin the school context and with discipline-specific discourse. Interestingly, the researchers also noted theimportance attached to listening comprehension by both student and academic respondents, since it isthis that enables them to play ‘classroom tennis’ effectively, ie, being comfortable enough in English soas to respond reasonably quickly and appropriately in spoken classroom exchanges. This has importantimplications for how listening skills should be tested, as well as taught, at the higher proficiencylevels; such insights are valuable for the IELTS test producers because they can help inform the futuredevelopment of the listening test module in IELTS.3 A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEINDICATORS OF STUDENTS’ ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMPETENCEON ENTRY AND STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PROGRESS AT ANINTERNATIONAL POSTGRADUATE UNIVERSITYThe study by Gaynor Lloyd-Jones, Charles Neame and Simon Medaney sets out to investigatethe selection processes and decision-making rationales of admissions personnel in an international,postgraduate UK setting and the consequences for the academic progress of borderline non-nativeEnglish speaking students at their institution. The project was contextualised within UK concerns overdeclining degree standards due to the impact of internationalisation initiatives on the expanded taughtMasters postgraduate sector. This study is particularly welcome because few studies to date haveresearched the selection practices associated with this area, even though much of the recent expansionin UK international student numbers has taken place in the postgraduate sector involving taught Mastersprograms. The researchers adopted a case study approach to examine the phenomenon of studentselection in a postgraduate UK higher education institution specialising in engineering and managementthrough a variety of different Masters programs.IELTS Research Reports Volume 1113