EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea - TOEIC on the way out!
Though I highly doubt it will go away anytime soon (Can we all say VESTED INTEREST), I think the best way to describe how I felt as I read through these posts is…intrigued. EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea - TOEIC on the way out!
Amen!“I have always stated that the TOEIC test is a fundementally useless test for indicating communicative English ability.”
I really appreciated the comments from the eclexys site:
“It’s not just that TOIEC doesn’t test real ability; it’s also that TOEIC sidetracks people from trying to learn to understand English, into memorizing ridiculous obscure grammar points and, worse, memorizing methodologies designed to maximize correct answers on TOEIC tests through absolutely inane grammatical analysis of the questions.”
I’m left wondering AGAIN to myself, and to the rest of you: What is our classroom (be it ESL, Math, Social Studies, English Lit) really, really for? Is it about taking and passing exams? Tests? State/Province standardized exams? Or is it about developing real world skills?
If you look at the TOEIC and how it is bumping into the real world (businesses and companies) we see that a shift is happening. The market is moving on. The test has remained largely unchanged. The market is saying it values personal things like a candidate’s ability to interact with others, to relate. It values experience. High TOEIC scores are no longer THE important factor, as corporations are realizing that high TOEIC doesn’t always mean a great worker.
ESL classes shouldn’t focus on prepping for the test as much as it should focus on helping students prepare to use English in workplace realities. The market is speaking, are we listening?
My thought: a sole focus on exam prepping is short changing the student. A shot in the foot. A raw deal. They may score highly on the exam, but completely screw up that key English phone call, or conversation. Result: Poor results on the job. Angry boss. Loss of job? (But I’ve got a 900 on the TOEIC!)
I KNOW lots of high scorers on the TOEIC who can’t write a clear, understandable sentence in English to save their life. We won’t talk about face-to-face conversations.
It’s not about the TOEIC results. It’s about reality. Teach how to learn, teach reality, and you can guarantee your students better TOEIC results, and better reality results. *With the latter being far more valuable!
Hey, interesting comments. My response would be that you’re quite right on a number of counts:
1. Vested Interests in the teaching community, and a general stagnation of programming, will ensure that TOEIC testing and TOEIC test preparation continue in full force for the next long while. However, it may change faster than anyone expects: this happens in Korea sometimes.
2. What the market “says” isn’t always useful to people, either. For example, the market “demanded” students with good TOEIC scores for a long time, even if those scores funamentally reflected nothing about applied English ability.
3. The fact of the matter is that many high-scorers on TOEIC never need to use English in their professional lives. The rare occasion that a foreigner need be dealt with, they tend either to be redirected to a better English speaker, or hung up on. This happens with such regularity that it leads one to suspect the results of uch hang-ups or redirects are absolutely nothing. People don’t get fired for hanging up on a caller with whom they are unable to communicate.
And this really is not a complaint about how Korean support desk people handle foreigner callers. (After all, in Canada if someone called the bookshop I worked in and spoke to me in Chinese, after a short attempt to get them to speak English — or maybe French — I would have hung up on th person.)
Rather, I’m trying to say that the English language ability-related demands imposed on applicants are much higher than the demands placed on workers. Someone working as manager of a little telecom outlet doesn’t need English, even if she or he needed to get a good TOEIC score to qualify for the position.
There’s a false demand for English imposed on Koreans in the labour market which actually doesn’t reflect how much English they can/will use in their work. This is what allows a testing standard to flourish despite the fact that it doesn’t consistently, realistically reflect applied ability to USE the language.
But since plenty of students are training in fields in which they do not intend to work — since post-secondary education isn’t really directly related to career here — the TOEIC score is just one other supposedly “objective” exam that can be used to filter the reams and reams of applicants with unrelated degrees who try for every attractive work opportunity that comes up.
All of which is to say that simply abolishing TOEIC won’t help so much, and that TOEIC isn’t the whole of the problem. The environment that allows TOEIC scores to mean anything would also have to change radically, or else you’d just get some other test in its place.
Comment by gordsellar — January 4, 2006 @ 6:17 am