THE MORALITY OF THE TEST OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (TOEFL) 3

One candidate from a western Eu-ropean country had an English mother, and her entire application confirmed her own categorization of herself as “virtually bilingual,” yet her TOEFL score was a mere 597, which, the computer-generated form from the university’s Office of International Admissions told us, indicated that she “may need supplementary English training.” A doctoral candidate from an African country in which English is widely spoken had attended an Englishlanguage university for his undergraduate and master’s degrees and had sterling references and published academic work, yet his scores on the TOEFL and Graduate Record Examination were both abysmally low. What should we do in such situations? Both candidates were admitted, but in each case the test scores complicated the decision rather than making it easier; in the case of scores on the Graduate Record Examination, for example, we are required by the university’s graduate school to obtain an official exception for any candidate who does not score the required minimum in this test. 71 Values in English Language Teaching Another moral paradox is the disjuncture between testing and current pedagogical practice in language teaching (Hamp-Lyons, 1998). The communicative model that, in various forms, is widely used across the world encourages students to engage in meaningful interaction using whatever linguistic means they have at their disposal; it specifically downplays the importance of grammatical accuracy over communicative effectiveness. Although some tests have made more or less successful attempts to integrate communicative competence in their evaluations of students (the Cambridge suite of examinations and the ACTFL’s [American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages] proficiency guidelines for foreign languages [Byrnes & Canale, 1987] come to mind; see also Powers, Schedl, & Wilson, 1999), the TOEFL has notably lagged behind in this regard, and many other tests still focus narrowly on grammar and vocabulary.2 One consequence of this disjuncture is the so-called washback effect: the ways in which test format affects teaching. The theory behind the TOEFL, like any test of its kind, is that it is a snapshot of a candidate’s language ability at a given moment in time; thus, it should not be possible to improve one’s performance other than by more study of the language. In reality, of course, TOEFL preparation courses and programs abound. Liz Hamp-Lyons (1998) offered a very thoughtful analysis of some of the ethical (what I would call moral) issues that arise from the “powerful” (p. 331) washback effect of such an influential test as the TOEFL. Drawing on the work of Mehrens and Kaminsky (1989) and Popham (1991), Hamp-Lyons posed the question of what constitutes “ethical test preparation” (p. 334) and argued that existing materials (and hence a great deal of existing test preparation programs across the world) are “educationally indefensible (boosting scores without mastery) and of dubious ethicality (coaching merely for score gain)” (p. 334). She went on to ask a series of provocative and important questions, all of which have a strong moral dimension: Can a test be blamed for the ways in which some teachers teach towards it? […]