IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher education1 INTRODUCTIONIn 2007, 17.3% of the student population in Australian universities were international students, withthe top five source countries each Asian (IDP, 2007). These students have a number of adjustmentissues in the Anglophone university environment (Deumert et al, 2005). Such students enter acomplex environment of not only a foreign language, but a foreign language in an academic register(Canagarajah, 2002). IELTS assesses the listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities in Englishof potential Language Background other than English (LBOTE) students. In this paper, we use theacronym LBOTE to describe the language background of these students, unless quoting literaturewhich refers to them in some other way, such as non-English Speaking Background (NESB).A useful brief history of the IELTS testing system and selected associated research is contained inHyatt and Brooks (2009, p 21). IELTS provides tertiary institutions with data about potential (LBOTE)students’ English proficiency at a point in time. Universities use cut-off scores as an indication ofa threshold level below which students are deemed unlikely to cope with the language demands ofuniversity-level study. Thus, setting threshold scores is intended to minimise the extent to whichEnglish language ability inhibits performance (especially early) in a course. Bayliss and Ingram (2006,p 1) describe the ‘meaning’ of an IELTS score for tertiary study as follows:… the score a student achieves in an IELTS test is meant to indicate whether he/she hasa sufficient level of English proficiency to cope with the linguistic demands of tertiarystudies, (but) it does not imply that they will succeed academically or that they will notstruggle linguisticallyA similar meaning is ascribed by O’Loughlin and Arkoudis (2009, p 100):… it predicts the extent to which a candidate will be able to begin studying throughthe medium of EnglishIt is important to remember that categories such as ‘LBOTE students’ or ‘international students’describe heterogeneous populations, ‘from diverse cultural, economic, social and linguisticbackgrounds…(that) cannot unproblematically be characterised as (all) having (the same) qualities’(Ryan and Viete, 2009, p 304). Thus, terms such as ‘South Asians’ disguise an immense diversitybetween educational cultures, intellectual heritages and students’ learning experiences.Teacher education students whose language background is not English and, in the case of graduateentry teacher education students who completed undergraduate degrees in cultures where English isnot the majority language, provide a distinct sub-cohort of this category. These students not only needto perform adequately in English for the purposes of their academic study, but also need to be fluent inthe public situation of teaching their own classes on practicum and in their future careers (to ‘perform’in a different sense), while learning about the cultures of Anglophone schooling. There are also writtenabilities required of teachers that differ from academic work, such as preparing comprehensible writtenmaterials in English, and marking school pupils’ work in English. Thus, for teacher education students,the ‘public performance’ of English adds a significant layer of issues to those applying to other cohortsof students subject to IELTS testing. Han (2006) has shown that Australia also confronts such studentswith unfamiliar pedagogies that in their turn produce certain dominant, contradictory or competingelements that make the task of identity transformation a challenge for such students – in our termsas public ‘performers’ of English. In addition, in Australia, teacher accreditation authorities requireparticular levels of language achievement (see Table 4 below). In the state of New South Wales theIELTS Research Reports Volume 1177