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FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION Background Psychological (and its interface, the psycholinguistic) factors

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P78-C4

2026-07-24

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FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION

Background

Psychological (and its interface, the psycholinguistic) factors

Levels of proficiency beyond early and intermediate acquisition have not been prominent in second-language acquisition research as a topic worth pursuing. And yet studies of advanced writing, of vocabulary acquisition, of pragmatic interference and of discourse handling, these are all relevant to the study and the assessment of advanced proficiency. The ELTS evaluators needed to analyze how far the test designers had looked at these different areas of language studies and had incorporated these ideas in the ELTS test. What became clear during the study was how little is known about levels of proficiency and what it is that distinguishes one level from another in terms of language function. It was also necessary to take note of how much English was used in different countries, the question being whether those from settings with poor resources should be tested separately, on the grounds that more important than the present proficiency of candidates from those settings was their aptitude for gaining future proficiency within a resource-rich environment, for example in a UK university.