International English Language Testing System

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is a broad-based, multidisciplinary, multipart examination administered to people in non-English-speaking nations who are interested in pursuing academic opportunities and/or short- or long-term employment in a country in which English is the primary language, specifically in Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Since its inception in the mid-1980s, the test has been used as a critical metric for determining proficiency and confidence in language skills in the four primary methods of communication: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Frequently, competency in the English language is held as a prime prerequisite for admission into prestigious academic programs and for application to potentially lucrative employment opportunities. The British Council, the Cambridge English Language Assessment Program, and IELTS Australia serve as managers for the test, both overseeing the creation of the tests and administering the scoring and the distribution of those scores.

Background

Because of the rapid evolution of digital communication and the globalization of both education and business, language skills have become an essential element of a professional profile. Whatever the field of study or employment, a person will be expected to share opinions, ideas, perspective, experiences, and information in language. If that person aspires to be part of a country in which English is the dominant or primary language, then proficiency in that language is a necessity.

The genesis of IELTS, however, reflected a decidedly nationalistic, rather than global, perspective. The test was first proposed by the British Council in conjunction with the communication and linguistics departments of the University of Cambridge during the 1980s. To preserve the primacy of the English language, advocates of testing for language proficiency for admission to the country saw such tests as a way to guarantee the preservation of British culture itself. The original prototypes of the examination ran into difficulties as questions were deemed biased or confusing. Furthermore, the concept behind the test generally appeared to imply that Britain was somehow weeding out foreigners.

But despite initial public-relations issues and concerns over the wording of test questions, the test developed and began to thrive. By the mid-1990s, more than forty thousand tests were being administered annually. International conglomerates as well as Britain’s network of universities began to use the test scores as an element of consideration in applicants.

As the examination evolved during the 1990s, it intended to create test situations that would mimic the expectations of real-world interactions. The test was not designed to be an element of the process of learning English, but rather to test whether English language skills were sufficient to participate successfully in a variety of professional and academic situations. A student from a foreign nation attending a British university would be expected to read material proficiently, speak in class and with students and faculty, write both short answer examination questions and research papers, and listen effectively and comprehensively in situations that might range from a classroom to a restaurant, from seeking housing accommodations to negotiating basic sales and services. Despite its critics—who pointed out that students and professionals in the United Kingdom never had to demonstrate their language skills or proficiency—the test has become a standard element of assessments. By the 2020s, the test was administered to over three million people each year. The IELTS continued to evolve over the early twenty-first century. Updates included the introduction of new questions that require test takers to engage with digital texts, reflecting the growing importance of digital literacy.

Topic Today

Taking a little under three hours to complete, the IELTS tests four areas of language skills: reading (one hour), writing (one hour), listening (thirty minutes), and speaking (eleven to fourteen minutes). Only the speaking component can be done on its own; the rest are most often done on a single day. The intention of the examination is to measure as objectively as possible four competency areas: the ability to communicate coherently—that is, engineer organized sentences and paragraphs; the ability to use a comprehensive and level-appropriate vocabulary; the ability to recognize critical grammatical constructions and to maintain correct sentence execution; and the ability to receive information in English, to listen with focus and comprehension. There are two different tests, between which the test taker can choose depending on their purpose: Academic, with questions that specifically reflect university situations, and General Training, with questions and scenarios that reflect real-life business and professional interactions.

Each section has multiple parts, but generally the test format is short answer (true or false, sentence completions, and multiple choice). Thus, it is scored by a computer to assure objective (and accurate) results. In the listening section, for instance, the test taker is asked to listen to conversations and/or a short talk in English and then answer questions about the content of that presentation. The emphasis is on comprehension and the ability to process that comprehension quickly and effectively.

Test takers are asked to use language in context in the writing and speaking sections. The writing performance is scored for grammatical correctness, sentence construction, general coherence, and clarity; the speaking section is scored for fluency, "lexical resource" (meaning the vocabulary used and its context), grammatical correctness, and pronunciation. The works are not to be evaluated for content. In the writing section, for instance, test takers could be asked to describe a place that has special meaning for them or to write a letter of application for a particular posting. The speaking section is scheduled as a one-on-one interview with an evaluator. It has three parts: introduction and interview, long turn (in which the test taker must speak on a topic for several minutes), and discussion (the test taker and the interviewer have a discussion about the topic in the long turn section).

The scores on the test reflect the general range of most academic testing. Numbers represent nine levels of assessment: expert, very good, good, competent, modest, limited, extremely limited, intermittent, non-user, and "did not attempt." That score, in turn, becomes an element of the test taker’s application profile.

Bibliography

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