I wish I knew better how well TOEFL scores are indicating preparedness for students entering my university. I simply don't know if those students who are admitted based on TOEFL scores feel or are judged as prepared for university study.
In order to better educate myself, I just went to look at sample TOEFL questions. Here is how the example reading passage supplied by ETS began: "The railroad was not the first institution to impose regularity on society."
ETS (TOEFL) is correct that this is standard English, but many native speakers may not be able to restate this sentence in their own words. Most Americans do not think of the railroad as an institution, and I can imagine that the concept of things such as railroad being institutions may not transfer well into other cultures. And because the railroad has such a fundamental place in American history, it might be difficult for students to conceptual the railroad in such as way.
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Robin, I love this example. Honestly, I re-read the selected sentence you copied a number of times to check that I was reading it correctly! I know from experience that it's not easy to develop test items, but wow, talk about decontextualized....
ReplyDeleteI think one example would help you to understand the situation better. We touched upon this point when we took SLA last semester and Yoha, a students from China shocked me when she told awkward story. She took the TOEFL test with her friend who majored in biology and her friend took 100/120. She could not believe that, but she discovered later on that the two reading sections were completely about biology and her friend succeeded with that while she was good at English and she hated Science subjects. I guess this is a good example to tell how greedy ETS is.
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