FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION
Background
Social (and its interface with the linguistic and sociolinguistic) factors
ELTS was predicated on a committed view of language variety, itself deriving from the more theoretical notions in sociology of role and status, and in sociolinguistics (or sociology of language) of the significance of situation in determining language use (situation being understood to include all aspects of setting, including the speakers and their relationships to one another), as well as the more practical communicative competence view that language learning (and therefore its assessment) should be communicative, by which was understood being appropriate to its purpose.
The theoretical and practical reasons for the design of ELTS appeared convincing at the time of its construction. But when it came to the evaluation it was necessary to look closely at the rationale for its design, and in particular at the validity of the notion of discrete language varieties. For this part of the investigation, again it was necessary to call on subject specialists but also to undertake an empirical investigation which compared performance on the same subject modules by students with different specialist backgrounds, and the opposite, different subject modules by students from the same specialist backgrounds.
It was also necessary to examine the claims of communicative competence and estimate the extent to which a test could ever be truly communicative, given the requirements of the communicative competence idea, that it be spontaneous and non-predictable.
Here too it was necessary to look at differential performance on ELTS by various groups (for example males and females, younger and older students) as well as by speakers from different language backgrounds. A continuing controversy (which we come back to under politics below) was whether those who could lay claim to an education in their own countries in English medium should be excused the test.
A related issue, which has become increasingly important, is whether international tests such as TOEFL, ELTS or its successor IELTS are biased against speakers of non-metropolitan varieties of English, such as Indian English (Davies, Hamp-Lyons and Kemp 2003).
