IELTS for Mothertongues: So you thought you knew English! January 4, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
A weird experience six week ago that, while in no sense historical, might interest some poor folks out there who have to go through the same ordeal. Beach was born in the shires of England. As such English is his mothertongue and lacking any particular linguistic proficiency he knows English well and lots of other languages badly. However, recently a bureaucratic body, which will rename nameless, chose to doubt this. A British passport was not enough: no! Several books written in English: ha! The fact that Beach teaches in English to university-level students? Don’t make me laugh! There was only one way to convince the bureaucrats in question: Beach had to sit an English test. And so it was that, late November, Beach turned up at a hotel in an Italian city, two hundred Euros poorer, to endure a IELTS exam. He had three hours of boredom before him in Listening, Reading and Writing. Then, in the late afternoon he was penned in to do a fifteen minute speaking exam. The hotel foyer was full of earnest young Italians. It proved, in fact, a rare chance to see the British through Italian eyes. First, a IELTS official shouted (in a nice way) at an Italian student who tried to bring a waterbottle in without taking the label off (she could have written the contents of a pocket Oxford Dictionary on the label, of course). Next, students were given rules about toilet breaks in horrifying detail. There were also security photographs and regimented exam halls with the desks at regulation distance. The Italians would have been laughing into their sleeves had they not been fearful of what was to come. And that in short is how the British Empire worked. Giggle at me, Abdul, and I’ll shoot your bloody elephant.
Beach was anxious. He knew that he should do well. But he had no idea how the exam worked, not even having taken the time to check out the basic structure online. Still, he walked into the listening exam borderline confident. Pride comes before a fall…. About a third of the way down the first page, Beach began to think of the geography of Gaelic-speaking Scotland in the Middle Ages and suddenly looked up to realize that he had missed a question. Further reverses were to follow. The CD of the exam had a conversation between a man and a woman who were interested in sports at altitude. It was one of those conversations that was (i) excruciatingly boring; (ii) excruciatingly technical. Here Beach’s attention held. But he had real problems keeping the information together and definitely dropped some points: sweat was now glistening on his rosy forehead. The reading exam followed and was actually fun and the writing exam was pure bliss. Beach got to compose a letter to a work colleague about a horse-themed birthday party and then threw down a short excursus on the role of tradition in education. He took great care to answer the questions and, in fact, would have made a series of question-related errors had he not had time to go back through the exams and reread three times. (If any English mothertongue finds themselves in the same situation Beach would advise them to read those questions very carefully: don’t take anything for granted.) Then, finally, there was the the speaking exam with a painfully attractive woman from the Thames Valley. Gaelic-speaking, water labels, drop-dead-beautiful examiners… Distractions proved to be the main feature of IELTS for this OAP.
Beach went out for a walk, had a wonderful visit to a medieval chapel, which had previously escaped notice, and mentally moved on. Two weeks later the results came back and they were sufficient but not marvelous. Beach got 9/9 on speaking and reading, of course. But in listening he got an 8/9 and on writing, this one really rankles, he was given a 8.5/9. The bastards! By an extraordinary coincidence one of the examiners was a man Beach had once had an argument with about creepy old D. H. Lawrence. Could it be that…? No, ignoble thought! Doubtless the essays had not followed some invisible IELTS rules about how to write an English letter or convince a member of the general public. Beach probably started a sentence with ‘and/but’ or split an infinitive, and the mirror ‘crack’d from side to side’. What would a normal mothertongue English speaker have got, the type who speaks the language with eight vowels instead of fourteen and who only writes in text messages? The reading and listening exam required intelligence not just linguistic knowledge. And as to writing how many British or American adults can spell without a spell checker? IELTS, in fact, could work as a covert IQ test.
For regular readers apologies for this brief trip away from history. For anyone who turns up here from Google knowing that tomorrow they have to do a IELTS exam even though they were born on Rhode Island or in Treacle Row, Burnley, Beach’s advice is simple: concentrate in the listening exam (particularly if you are past 40 or bad at multitasking) and read and reread the instructions for all the others. Oh and don’t write on the water bottle…
Other mothertongue IELTS experiences: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com We could start a club.
5 Jan 2014: An anonymous IELTS examiner writes in with this comment. Hopefully this will help other mothertongues.
Bloody pain in the arse really, but it’s not their fault. Usually the blame lies with governments and universities; for example: the British govt requires everyone who wishes to practice as a doctor, dentist, physio etc in the U.K. to take an IELTS test. That means that every year we get 100-150 highly educated aussies rocking up on a Saturday to do an English proficiency test that they know next to nothing about. Your experiences are typical, and your 9,9,8,8.5 score is actually better than most.
Speaking – 9.0
not surprised. You’d have to have something wrong not to get full marks here.
Reading – 9.0
well done you! The comment that this was as much an intelligence test as a language one should sting IELTS; they are dedicated to the principle of only testing linguistic proficiency. Truth is that most native speakers lose concentration and fluff one or two questions. Your band score of 9.0 indicates you got either 39 or 40 out of 40. You may have got one wrong!
Listening – 8.0
No surprises here. The biggest challenge for native speakers here is maintaining concentration. 3 sections; 40 questions; dull topics; a recipe for daydreaming. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a native speaker get 100% here.
Writing – 8.5
Congratulations, you did better than most. Writing is by far the hardest to give a band 9.0 for due to the nature of the marking criteria. You remarked that perhaps your “essays had not followed some invisible IELTS rules about how to write an English letter or convince a member of the general public.” Alas, I fear you are correct.
There is a public version of the criteria available, but almost no-one is aware of it. The version that we work from is long and detailed and has many rather arbitrary rules that rankle many examiners. Rest assured that it won’t have been a “style” problem that bought you down the half band; starting sentences with “And”, and splitting infinitives are not what we are looking for.
Rather, it will probably have been the “Task Achievement” critieria. If I were a betting man (which I am) I would say that you failed to give equal treatment to the 3 bullet points in you letter rubric. If your letter was to a friend about a party, it would have had 3 bullet points like this:
… Tell your friend:
- why you are having a party
- when the party will be
- who will be invited
