IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher educationSecond Language Proficiency Rating, now superseded by the International Second Language ProficiencyRating). Specifically, the IELTS speaking test ‘did not provide opportunities for candidates to produce therange of oral communication expected of student teachers in tertiary tutorials and secondary classroomsand thus lacked construct and content validity’ (Viete, 1998, p 173). Some of the skills which large-scaletests are unable to elicit, but which DEOTE does elicit include ‘the requirements of effective listening inmultichannel conversation, the need to manage speculative language and the skill of explaining a conceptin more than one way’ (Viete, 1998, p 174). The DEOTE has been used to rate international students onfive levels of performance from ‘unsatisfactory’ to ‘advanced’, with two levels used to indicate whetherthe candidate requires extended or minor support. Viete (1998, p 172) argues that support programs needto be ‘designed to extend students’ communicative competence and experience with the local educationalculture once they are on course.’ An important feature of the DEOTE is that it is administered byteacher educators. ‘Two trained raters are used, one an expert in the disciplinary discourse in which thecandidate has qualifications (e.g. Science), and the other a practitioner in TESOL and teacher education’(Viete, 1998, pp 179-180). The ratings generated against the assessment criteria by the two teachereducatorraters are moderated through discussion that clarifies differing interpretations. This meansthat the teacher educators who are to teach these students not only meet the students, but learn moreabout the relationship between linguistic performance and content area discourse. Thus in terms of costeffectiveness there is the added ‘beneficial washback from the test. Teacher [educators] involved intesting have become more aware of the communication skills their [teacher trainees] need to develop,and have attempted to take account of these in their course design’ (Viete,1998, p 180). The dual functionof this test, in assessing student-teachers and in educating teacher educators about how to address theirneeds, must be taken into consideration in judging the cost effectiveness of the DEOTE.In a study of the authenticity of the testing of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) for teachereducation students, Elder (2001) investigated:1 whether the domain of teacher proficiency was distinguishable from other areas ofprofessional competence or from ‘general’ language proficiency;2 what constituted appropriate task design on a teacher-specific instrument;3 the role of non-language factors in a candidate’s response to a contextualised test task.Though agreeing that teaching required highly specialised language skills, Elder argued for cautionin the application of LSP testing because of the indeterminacy of performance-based tasks as a meansof measurement.Woodrow (2006) investigated the predictive validity of IELTS for Education postgraduate courseworkstudents, along with academic staff attitudes to English proficiency. IELTS subtest scores werecorrelated against students’ semester 1 grade point averages (GPA). Other personal experiencevariables obtained through a questionnaire were included in the analysis. Academic staff completedquestionnaires concerning their views on the English proficiency of students. The results indicated thatEnglish language proficiency as measured by IELTS is moderately predictive of academic achievementin the first semester of study for the student sample. Weak but significant correlations were obtainedbetween overall IELTS bands and GPA. There were significant correlations between writing, speakingand listening subtests and GPA. No significant correlational relationship between other variables suchas professional experience and academic achievement, as measured by semester 1 GPA, was found.The analysis indicated that at a lower level of English, the relationship is stronger than at a higherlevel. Thus, for students scoring 6.5 or lower, proficiency may influence their achievement, whereaswith students scoring 7 and above, English proficiency does not influence academic performance.IELTS Research Reports Volume 1191