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Putting our Teaching to the Test: Language Learning and Test Preparation by Graham Tullis and Charles Talcott

'Performance evaluation', 'Competence appraisal', 'Outcomes assessment' – call it what you will, but increasingly teachers are having to adapt to the challenges of benchmarking their students' language performance with international standardized tests. And, of course, teachers are also discovering that they themselves may well be the ones who are being benchmarked.

Test preparation, in one form or another, looks like it's firmly established on the course curriculum. But how should teachers coherently integrate assessment and test preparation into their courses? How should the teacher navigate through the test prep jungle? What are some of the pitfalls to avoid and some of the 'best practices' for developing test preparation courses?

Best pedagogical practice suggests that the objectives of most ELT courses should be defined in terms of the acquisition of specific language skills or sets of skills. But, at first glance, it would appear that the demands of test preparation shift the emphasis away from language learning towards another skill that is not normally a language acquisition objective in itself, namely, test-taking.

Today test prep has evolved into a global industry in its own right and one which can take some pretty extreme forms. In some countries, for example, we are seeing the emergence of a new breed of teacher – the professional 'test guru' who repeatedly sits international standardized tests in order to memorize the questions and then to subject them to intense psychometric, statistical number crunching. This results in highly codified and seemingly infallible test preparation methods, along the lines of: 'Now, if one of the questions on part 2 begins with the following phrase, “Which of the two do you prefer?", remember that the correct multiple choice answer will invariably be… not 'a'… not 'b' but c !'

Although reducing test prep to a simple question of memorization may, in some cases, lead to slightly higher scores, it also defeats the objective of the exercise and creates the vicious circle where it is assumed that the more tests students do the better their results.

Language teachers, caught within the test prep paradigm, feel their roles reduced to test administrators, with course content restricted to mechanical drilling and an endless series of practice exams that the teacher must monitor and correct. Surely, test preparation should be focused on more than maximizing student scores. But how to reconcile test preparation with communicative language teaching where students would actually be developing real language competence and practising a living language?

If we take the example of France where we work, the test that is used the most extensively is the TOEIC. In common with other tests, the TOEIC presents a selection of material that has been 'distilled' from authentic, professional language situations in the form of questions or 'test items'. Now what characterizes a 'test item' is this: all test items are delivered vacuum packed! Which means that they have been extracted from their original contexts and thus can appear to retain no connection to anything outside the test itself.

And it is precisely this lack of contextualisation that makes traditional test preparation materials so user-'un'friendly and turns test preparation into such an arduous task. So what can we do to revive the original, living context of the professional test item and breathe some life into our test preparation courses?

One way to do that is by turning the whole problem on its head. First, we need to identify the deep themes and situational contexts that the test references. Then we need to examine the test for its fundamental skill-sets. This, of course, requires that we look beyond the immediate skill of test-taking and examine the real-life professional skill-sets around which the test items are organized. For example, does the test assume familiarity with telephoning, participating in a meeting, presenting or negotiating? Once the fundamental contexts are identified, the nuts and bolts work of highlighting the lexical and grammatical components can begin.

With this broad map of a standardized test we can then build a blended course syllabus. Instead of reproducing disconnected mirror images of individual test items, a communicative approach to test preparation places our students at the centre, immersing them in the professional contexts from which the test was derived.

The key to blending language learning with test preparation is to perceive a test as 'authentic' material that references real-life professional contexts. This perception opens up test preparation to innovative lesson planning, allowing teachers to do what they do best - develop creative lessons that experiment with and incorporate authentic, professionally-contextualized themes, skills and structures, which are, after all, the hallmarks of effective language acquisition courses.

Graham Tullis and Charles Talcott are co-authors of Target Score published by Cambridge University Press