Assessing English Proficiency for University Study

J. Read

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137315694
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This book focuses on strategies and procedures for assessing the academic language ability of students entering an English-medium university, so that those with significant needs can have access to opportunities to enhance their language skills.

1

The Context: Students in English-Medium Universities

Introduction

The main focus in this book is on universities in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the other predominantly English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Traditionally most if not all of the students entering universities in these countries were essentially monolingual in English, having completed all of their previous education through the medium of the language and having demonstrated a high level of literacy through their performance in upper secondary school examinations or standardized aptitude tests. Furthermore, the students were overwhelmingly drawn from the upper strata of their society in social and economic terms.

This generalized account needs to be qualified to some degree. In Canada French has had equal official status with English throughout the country since 1969 and there is a long history of French-medium university education, especially in Québec, the one province where the great majority of the population is French-speaking. Both the oldest (Université Laval) and the largest (Université du Québec) universities in Canada are Francophone. In addition, a number of institutions, such as the University of Ottawa, are bilingual in English and French. This means that, at least for a minority of universities in Canada, academic literacy in French rather than English is an issue.

And in the United States, through its complex structure of colleges and universities, there has been until recently a higher level of participation in post-secondary education than in other English-speaking countries, reflecting a commitment to educational opportunity as a vehicle for upward social mobility. One by-product of that broader participation by students with a range of academic preparedness has been the widespread provision of required composition courses for freshman students to develop their writing skills. The professional body for scholars and practitioners in this field, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, was founded as long ago as 1949. Thus, in the American context at least, addressing the academic literacy needs of undergraduate students is not a new phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the general pattern that universities in English-speaking countries used English as their sole medium of instruction and served predominantly students who were both monolingual and highly competent in the language persisted to varying degrees until relatively recently. However, a cluster of demographic, economic, and social trends over the last 40 years or more have dramatically changed the language backgrounds of students entering the universities and have posed new linguistic challenges for the institutions in maintaining high-quality teaching and learning programmes. It is useful to review the major trends as the basis for understanding the need for universities to assess the language ability of incoming students and to introduce programmes to enhance the students’ language skills where appropriate.

International students in English-speaking countries

1950s to 1980s

The first important trend is the flow of international students to universities in English-speaking countries. The United States was an early leader in the 1950s and 1960s in attracting what were then generally known as foreign students, especially high-achieving graduate students who were drawn to study in well-resourced and prestigious American research universities as a pathway to successful careers in government, the professions, business, or academia in their own countries. The emergence of the United States after World War II as a superpower and the parallel growth of English as an international language were key factors in this development. Since a high proportion of the foreign students came from non-English-speaking backgrounds, it was soon recognized that robust assessment procedures were needed to determine whether their English proficiency was sufficient to meet the language demands of academic study. Spolsky (1995) outlines some early initiatives to develop suitable tests in the 1950s, at the University of Michigan and American University. However, by 1961 there were 48,000 foreign students in the United States and, at a conference organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics in that year, both university admissions officers and government agencies sponsoring students from abroad expressed frustration at the lack of a widely available test they could rely on to assess the students’ English before they were admitted to the country (Spolsky 1995, pp. 220–1). As it turned out, the conference laid the groundwork for the development of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which was introduced in 1964 and became for many years the dominant international test for this purpose.

In the United Kingdom during this period, there were also considerable numbers of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds but, in the British case, the focus was more on providing educational and training opportunities for people from the former colonial territories which now formed part of the (British) Commonwealth, as well as from other parts of the world that were targeted for overseas development assistance. Thus, a high proportion of foreign students in the UK were recipients of British Government scholarships. The newly independent Commonwealth nations generally inherited from the colonial authorities an English-medium education system, at least in the form of secondary schools and tertiary institutions for the political and economic elites (for a critical perspective, see Phillipson 1992, 2009c). This meant that the English competence of scholarship holders from the Commonwealth was often very high, but the levels of competence were sufficiently variable that it was considered necessary to develop formal English language assessment procedures.

Therefore, in the 1960s and 1970s the British Council, which administered a number of scholarship programmes, commissioned the English Proficiency Test Battery (EPTB) and then replaced it in the 1980s with the English Language Testing Service (ELTS) (Davies 2008). These tests will be discussed further in Chapter 6, but it is important to note that their primary function was to provide Council officials with a valid basis for determining, not so much whether students and trainees could be admitted to their proposed programme of study, but rather whether they would first need to improve their English language proficiency and, if so, for how long. Any required English language tuition was seen as an integral component of the scholarship award. In this sense, then, the function of the EPTB and ELTS had something in common with the post-entry language assessments which are the main focus of this book. They were not intended as gatekeeping devices so much as diagnostic procedures to help identify and address academic language needs among students who had already been selected for an academic or technical study programme.

A similar pattern, albeit on a smaller scale, could be seen in Australia and New Zealand in the post-war period up until the 1980s. International students in these countries were almost all either on government scholarships under development assistance programmes such as the Colombo Plan, or they entered the country through bilateral arrangements with Commonwealth countries in the Asia-Pacific region such as Malaysia and Fiji. Both countries developed their own English tests, such as the Language Achievement Test for Overseas Students (LATOS) in New Zealand in the 1970s (St George 1981), and the Short Selection Test (SST) in Australia in the 1980s. However, by that time a decisive shift was occurring in the flows of international students globally, which we will discuss further in a moment.

Trends since the 1980s

By the end of the 1980s, Australian universities, through their International Development Program (now IDP Education Australia), had become full partners with the British Council and the Cambridge Examinations Syndicate in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which was introduced in 1989 as the successor to ELTS. IDP was already adopting an entrepreneurial approach to the recruitment of international students for Australian universities, and the organization was influential in shifting the use of IELTS away from mainly government-sponsored students to a much higher proportion of private fee-paying ones. In a similar fashion to its major rival TOEFL in North America, IELTS quickly became the English test that international students needed to ‘pass’ as a prerequisite for being admitted to a tertiary academic programme in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. This pre-admission gatekeeping function of IELTS came to overshadow the post-selection diagnostic role performed by its British predecessors, the EPTB and ELTS.

As noted above, the United States and the United Kingdom have long been the dominant destinations for international students, not just among English-speaking countries but in the world at large. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2014), the two countries retained the top two positions in 2011, with 709,565 and 419,946 ‘mobile students’ respectively out of a worldwide total of three and a half million tertiary students studying outside their country of origin. Australia had the fourth largest population of these students (262,597), just behind France. Collectively, the five main English-speaking countries accounted for 45 per cent of all international students. The current figures reflect a large growth in numbers over the last 30 years, particularly in relative terms in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, which have opened their doors to private fee-paying students from a wide range of countries, through liberalizing visa procedures, actively marketing institutions and academic programmes, offering pre-entry intensive courses in English for Academic Purposes and test preparation, and providing support services for the students in their host institutions.

In Australia the expansion of international education dates from 1985, when the Government announced a new policy of promoting export education services and offering places in Australian tertiary institutions to students from throughout the world who could pay full tuition fees. The growth in international student numbers since then has been spearheaded by IDP Education Australia, which had its origins in 1961 as a cooperative scheme among Australian universities to provide development assistance to their counterparts in Southeast Asia. IDP moved decisively to take advantage of the new policy and now has a network of 80 student placement centres in 25 countries, recruiting students not just for Australian universities but for others in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom as well (www.idp.com). Although still half-owned by the Australian universities, it operates on a commercial basis, with the other 50 per cent in the hands of SEEK Limited, an online employment and training company. IDP also delivers English language training services and manages the administration of IELTS in Australia and abroad. According to the UNESCO (2014) figures, the result of the recruitment drive by IDP and the export education industry as a whole is that international students accounted for more than 20 per cent of all enrolments at the tertiary level in 2011.

New Zealand has followed a similar pathway to Australia since the late 1980s, although on a smaller scale. The universities have all established international offices and developed recruitment strategies to attract full fee-paying students, with an initial focus on East and Southeast Asia. There is no direct equivalent of IDP, but Education New Zealand (www.enz.govt.nz) operates as a peak body for the export education industry, incorporating not just tertiary institutions but also secondary schools, private language schools, and other education providers. It promotes the ‘New Zealand Educated’ brand, works cooperatively with education agents, organizes participation in education fairs, and so on.

English language proficiency requirements

As previously indicated, universities in the English-speaking countries now set minimum scores on proficiency tests (particularly IELTS and TOEFL), which international students must achieve in order to be admitted to a degree programme. In this market-driven era in higher education, universities tend to align their requirements with those of other institutions in their own country. In the case of IELTS, the majority of Australian universities require an overall band score of at least 6.5 for undergraduate admission, often with a higher level for some if not all postgraduate programmes. On the other hand, the standard pattern at New Zealand universities is 6.0 for undergraduate study and 6.5 at the postgraduate level.

The official guidelines for IELTS (n.d.) state that students gaining just Band 6 need further English study before undertaking a degree programme. A score of 6.5 is ‘probably acceptable’ for courses which are considered linguistically less demanding, such as those in Agriculture, Pure Mathematics and Technology, but it is only at Band 7.0 that a student is probably ready for more demanding courses in disciplines like Medicine, Law, and Linguistics. Clearly the New Zealand university requirements fall below the recommended minimum proficiency levels. In their national survey of IELTS preparation courses in New Zealand, Read and Hayes (2003) interviewed teachers of such courses, who confirmed that students who obtained just 6.0 or 6.5 were likely to struggle to meet the language demands of their degree programmes. It can be argued that, if a university sets its proficiency standards low, a good proportion of international students admitted on that basis are at risk of failing their courses and thus the institution has an obligation to provide ongoing language support for these students to assist them in coping with course demands more adequately.

Of course, it is also true that the predictive power of English proficiency tests is a matter of ongoing debate and research. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of small-scale studies were conducted in various universities in Australia to compare IELTS test scores with academic achievement, as measured by grade point averages (GPAs) and other indicators. Cotton and Conrow (1998) found no significant relationship, whereas other researchers (for example, Elder 1993, Feast 2002, Hill, Storch, & Lynch 1999, Kerstjens & Nery 2000) obtained correlations which were generally significant but weak. In New Zealand Bellingham (1993) found a somewhat stronger relationship in a study that involved a single non-degree programme and included a number of students with scores below IELTS Band 6.0. These findings are consistent with the results of earlier research involving American proficiency tests such as TOEFL (Graham 1987, Light, Xu, & Mossop 1987) and the ELTS test in the UK (Davies & Criper 1988, cited in Davies 2008). Based on the ELTS Validation Study and the other evidence, Davies (2008) argues that .30 is about the level of correlation one can reasonably expect, given the number of factors that influence academic performance, apart from English language ability as measured by a proficiency test.

Another notable development in Australia and New Zealand in the last 15 years has been the opening up of new pathways to university entry. It is no longer the norm that international students come directly from their own countries to begin their degree studies once they have been accepted by the university, having achieved the required score on IELTS or TOEFL before they arrive there. Both universities (usually through an associated institute or language centre) and private language schools offer courses in English for Academic Purposes, Foundation Studies programmes, and bridging courses, which are all designed to provide international students with a broader-based preparation for academic study in a new educational environment than they typically gain in an IELTS preparation course where they merely engage in intensive practice of the test tasks (Read & Hayes 2003). In Australia the leading providers of such courses are the ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) colleges, which are represented by their national organization, English Australia (www.englishaustralia.com.au).

Often students who complete such programmes must still take IELTS in order to meet the university’s English language proficiency requirement, but an increasing phenomenon in Australia is the Direct Entry Program (DEP) (Agosti & Bernat 2009), whereby universities accept that the assessment procedures used in the ELICOS college can validly determine whether the student has achieved a standard of English proficiency equivalent to the relevant IELTS score. The argument is that, having worked intensively with the students for a lengthy period, the DEP staff have a much richer basis for assessing their academic language abilities and can use assessment tasks and tools which are not included in proficiency tests, such as researched essays, writing portfolios, oral presentations, and extended listening and reading tasks. However, it is essential that processes are in place to ensure that the appropriate standards are established and maintained. O’Loughlin (2009) describes the procedure he followed to benchmark the written examination of the University of Melbourne English Language Bridging Program (UMELBP) against the IELTS Academic Writing Module. On a broader scale, Read and Hirsh (2007) undertook a project to determine how to moderate standards for a range of assessment tasks across Foundation Studies programmes in four New Zealand university centres.

Recent developments in Australia

The need to monitor non-IELTS-based pathways to university study in Australia was highlighted by a Monash University academic Bob Birrell (2006), who received wide media coverage for his criticisms of universities for admitting students with low English proficiency to degree programmes. He cited evidence that a good proportion of international students applying for permanent residence in Australia after completing a degree in accounting or IT were unable to achieve Band 6.0 in the IELTS test as required by the immigration authorities. Tracing the root of the problem, Birrell pointed to the fact that students could enter the country initially on a visa that allowed them to study at a primary or secondary school, take a vocational (VET) or non-award course, or study English at an ELICOS college. Such visas required IELTS scores of 5.5, 5.0, or even just 4.0, depending on the proposed course of study. Having completed their course, many of these students could obtain a higher education visa for degree-level study without having to take IELTS again.

As a result of the ensuing public debate, the Department of Education, Science and Training, through its agency Australian Education International, set up a National Symposium on English Language Competence of International Students (AEI 2007) to review policy and practice in this area and recommend actions to address the problem areas that had been identified. The actio...