Several standardized tests and the organizations that write and administer them have come under scrutiny in recent years, having their fairness (or lack thereof) called into question during the age of social justice awareness. The overarching majority of these standardized tests are meant to measure students’ readiness for studies at the university level. Those who advocate for an overhaul of such tests, and in some cases the abolition of these tests altogether, call attention to the idea that these tests disproportionately favor certain demographic groups over others, particularly students from affluent families who can afford additional tutoring and expensive preparation programs designed to help them succeed the day of the exam. Prior to the era of social justice awareness, critics of standardized testing also questioned whether these exams actually provide a meaningful gauge of students’ abilities at the college level. This same argument can be made for many of the standardized tests that are meant to assess language aptitude and proficiency.
Most language educators in the United States will be familiar with ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), which consists of a thirty-minute phone call with a certified language tester who asks the candidate increasingly difficult questions in the target language. The OPI administrator will continue to increase the level of proficiency needed to answer the questions until the test-taker begins to stumble and grasp for words, at which point the tester will drop the difficulty of the questions and continue this cycle until a baseline proficiency level is established. The ACTFL OPI remains the most commonly used benchmark for teacher-training programs that certify language educators in the United States, and many language scholars praise the test for its goal of establishing what the testee can actually do with the language, as opposed to their knowledge about the language or their grammatical accuracy. ACTFL originally developed the OPI in order to gauge how well examinees would perform in a high-stakes language situation while working for the federal government, and thus many of the OPI’s critics argue that the test does not accurately measure one’s potential to teach their target language since the test was conceived for a different purpose. Other scholars argue that the test results are more dependent on the difficulty and question choice of the interviewer and that the OPI therefore does not guarantee fair results for all examinees.
Foreign nationals wishing to pursue a graduate degree at an accredited university in the United States must successfully complete the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). One could argue that the TOEFL’s format most closely mirrors the real-world situations that a foreign student would encounter while living and studying in the United States. All audio transcripts on the TOEFL consist of either customer service interactions or scripted conversations between a student and a professor during the latter’s office hours. For the speaking section of the exam, TOEFL examinees are required to record themselves speaking into a microphone and provide an opinion-driven analysis of what they have heard. TOEFL test-takers are also required to write extensively about an audio recording. They will even complete a section during which they will analyze and compare a written text and audio sample about the same topic. Despite its rigor and resemblance to real-life scenarios that students certainly will face while studying in the United States, critics of the TOEFL contend that the test is specifically crafted to keep students from specific countries, especially those who marginalize the importance of the English language, out of high-profile university programs.
Japanese language testing remains unique in that Japan has developed its own internationally recognized exam for language proficiency, namely the JLPT (The Japanese Language Proficiency Test). Japanese companies, schools, and professional organizations do not recognize high performance on Japanese language proficiency exams administered by other countries and organizations (such as an ACTFL OPI for Japanese). They will only recognize scores on the JLPT as an accurate indication of one’s proficiency in Japanese. Administered only twice a year, the JLPT measures test-takers’ proficiency on a scale of N5, indicating a basic understanding of fundamental Japanese taught in the classroom, to N1, which indicates native or near-native fluency. In the case of the JLPT, there remains an argument to be made that tastemakers designed the exam with the intent of keeping certain groups or foreign nationals from obtaining paid employment. For one, the test is notoriously difficult, especially at N1 certificate level. Also, those who have completed the JLPT are even given preferential treatment during the immigration process, and one must successfully achieve the N1 proficiency level in order to work as a medical practitioner in Japan.
Anyone working in the foreign language education space recognizes that language proficiency remains difficult to define. For this reason, it remains equally if not more difficult to design exams that fairly and accurately assess individuals’ proficiency in a second language. While we remain confident that standardized testing organizations put much time and effort into ensuring that their exams measure test-takers’ performance in a meaningful and equitable manner, one must remember that such tests do not always accurately reflect what individuals are capable of when using the target language. Please comment or reach out to us describing your experience with standardized language testing!
-Adam Shepherd
Cho, Sungdai. Oral Proficiency Interview, Pros and Cons. The Korean Language in America, Vol. 9. Penn State University Press, 2004.
JALT Testing & Evaluation SIG Newsletter. An Overview of the ACTFL Proficiency Interviews (Part 2). Vol. 1 (2) Sep. 1997.
Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Advantages of JLPT. https://www.jlpt.jp/e/about/merit.html
Laborda, Jesús García. Is the TOEFL exam aimed at everyone ? Research considerations in the training and application of the TOEFL exam abroad. The EUROCALL Review. Issue number 14, November 2008.
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