Teacher in Development

I got a great comment from gordsellar around recent posts over the TOEIC. I appreciated getting a local Korean perspective around this topic. He raises some interesting points that I never thought of before, so I would like to repost most of his comment here. Heads up for all TOEIC prep teachers out there…this one is for you… - Thanks Gord.

“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.”

Great stuff.

The strange English requirements of job applicants and the lack of real usage that employees have.
Imposed false English demands.
The TOEIC as a recruiter’s tool - a corporate funnel.
The environment that propagates it all.

So how do you change the environment? I wonder about the “false demand” and tough “artificial” English competencies that don’t reflect authentic work place conditions. What does it all mean for TOEIC prep and the ESL classroom?

Looking at the issue from the perspective you gave me really shows why soo many try to “hack” the test. If it’s just another recruiter’s tool, and not always a real indicator of a job where strong command of English is necessary, the TOEIC degrades into a lowly hurdle that must be conquered before landing a job.

So does TOEIC prep really belong in the ESL classroom, or with employment center workers?