This time last year, I was juggling two ELT positions in Korea at the same time: visiting professor in the English Education department at Kyungpook National University (mainly responsible for training Korean secondary school English teachers), and Business English consultant/teacher for an outsourcing company working with Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction (one of Korea's BIG companies!).
It was always interesting to discover ways in which the two positions could overlap!
For the Doosan execs, one of the things I had to do was prepare them for the TOEIC speaking test. After many years of grappling with test-prep, I found the TOEIC speaking test to be refreshingly pragmatic and grounded in the real needs of learners and business settings. Still, as is my wont, I couldn't help finding ways to adapt the basic format to more closely target the situation and needs of my Doosan students (Korean managers and technicians specializing in everything from research and design to international sales and major project management). After creating my own version of the basic TOEIC speaking test for the students to practice with, I went ahead and designed a more targeted version for my Doosan learners - called TOEIC FLEX Speaking (HI): a flexible rendition of the TOEIC speaking test especially for Heavy Industries and Construction.
I was mightily pleased with the learners' response to this specialized version of the TOEIC, but also at just how easy it was to adapt and really target to the learners' real world needs and professional requirements. That was when it occured to me that this basic TOEIC speaking test format could be adapted for the professional needs of non-native English language teachers as well!
The result was the TOEIC FLEX Speaking ELT test - a much expanded and reinterpreted rendition of the basic TOEIC speaking test made especially for English Language Teachers, and ready to trial with the 20-odd students in my Methodology of Practical English Teaching course at Kyungpook National University! I now tentatively call this application the TSELT (Test of Speaking for English Language Teachers).
Making, applying, and following up on this specialized test was an amazing experience, full of new discoveries and revelations. You can peruse the full test here, but of equal or even more interest are the follow up applications that were experimented with following the actual test-taking.
Based on their experiences and impressions of the test, I had students give their opinions in a variety of quantitative and qualitative polls online. A full overview of the test syllabus, screenshots of the individual sections, plus quantitative and qualitative survey results can be seen at a glance in the following document:
Download KNU_TSELT_Presentation_handouts_Jason_Renshaw[1]
This was a handout accompanying a presentation I did on this topic/research at a regional teacher conference in Daegu not long after students took the test. Contrary to initial expectations, teachers saw the worth in this test and thought they'd gained a lot in taking it! Helps of course that it was applied informally and did not count whatsoever toward their final grades in my course...
The qualitative responses were collected in an online forum at the link here, and make for very interesting reading! The point made about this test being equally valid and challenging for NATIVE English language teachers is possibly the most intriguing!
Possibly even more interesting was the final follow-up application: I put the students into groups of 4 and had them go ahead and make their own new versions of the test, using new content within (what they figured were) the parameters of the test I'd already made and applied with them. Here is an example of a new version of the same test, made by a group of student teachers. The general point of this was to include the students in the process, take them inside test-design (to learn in a hands-on fashion about test validity and reliability), and reflect on the sorts of classroom challenges and speaking skills they'd need in their future teaching careers.
So far, this has been little more than an interesting experiment, exploring the idea of a reliable and useful measuring tool of non-native English language teachers' ability to not only speak English, but use it effectively while applying good basic teaching methodology in the classroom. To be honest, the process was more about taking these student teachers on a journey of discovery and professional critical thinking and self-reflection than anything else. The plan is to expand the basic format more and adapt it into a tool for teacher self-development, goal-setting and awareness - hopefully avoiding that word "TEST"!
For now, I'd be interested in anyone's reactions to this initial research, and I'll throw some carrot questions out there in the hope it provokes some opinions...
- Is it fair to "test" the speaking ability of English language teachers?
- Is it possible to actually test this ability reliably?
- Is it a good idea to go beyond basic everyday speaking ability and apply it to the professional occupation and settings most relevant to professional language teachers?
- Would non-experienced or non-trained native speaker teachers end up doing better on this test than trained and experienced non-native teachers with less speaking confidence?
- How many teachers out there would realistically be willing to use this tool (and test themselves) independently fo professional development purposes?
- What would you add to or take away from the test format as it currently stands?
Interested in hearing your thoughts!!!
:-)
