Cynthia DeRoma, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Introduction

Our field is under attack! At least that is the impression we get when witnessing graduate student protests and several recent publications, most recently Nagai & Everhart (2022, henceforth N&E), demanding an end to ITA testing. Based on my own experience as an ITA practitioner, I hope to offer some brief insight into how much of this criticism is unwarranted and, on the flip side, what we can take away from it.

Intelligibility and standardization

No serious ITA practitioner expects their students to sound like “native speakers,” a term which in itself lacks a satisfactory consensual definition. Instead, intelligibility sounds like a much fairer goal. However, this concept, if not clearly defined, can still fuel criticism.

In simple terms, intelligibility involves an audience’s ability to understand a speaker. With that come questions of who this expected audience is. When this is not carefully laid out, an outside critic might insist that it leads to only one or very few forms of standardized (and usually also racialized) English being deemed intelligible to the detriment of multiple legitimate varieties. In other words, it can sound like good old native-speakerism in new clothes.

N&E consider the issue of interpretive labor, i.e., the work needed to understand others, emphasizing that it reveals an asymmetric power relation in which ITAs, to keep their scholarships and further their careers, must put all the effort in being understood while their listener counterparts put none. This is hurtful not only to ITAs, but also to their audience, who rarely improve the skills to be better communicators and thus perceive themselves as being at the mercy of an ITA’s efforts to be intelligible.

N&E, however, seem unaware of work within our field to characterize intelligibility and use it constructively not only in testing, but also in listener training to better divide the burden of interpretive labor.

The “deficit model” and cultural assimilation

Most ITA practitioners have been confronted with the accusation that they operate on a “deficit model,” and this appears in N&E as well. I do not think any of my colleagues view their students’ language as deficient, but on the other hand, it is hard to dodge this kind of criticism when evaluations rely so heavily on comparisons between a student’s language and some idealized version of what it should be like, focusing on errors and behaviors that deviate from an expected model. N&E go further and claim that, in their study, tests were particularly unfair because a successful performance required not just a certain kind of language, but also a “successful performance of the neoliberal self,” including aspects like confidence, body language, and eye contact, which to them means a requirement of full assimilation to the American culture. It seems hypocritical, then, for universities to claim a commitment to multiculturality and diversity and then “coerc[e] [students] into erasing their linguistic and cultural identities” (p. 7).

Most testing exists in the context of predicting how well a potential listener will understand an ITA, and therefore are focused on identifying differences. However, this is not the same as deeming a difference a deficit. When used carefully, identifying differences can serve as a tool for ITAs and their listeners to identify why communication breakdowns may occur and how to deal with them. The problem is that, once again, listeners are usually excluded from any responsibility for learning to deal with differences. Therefore, the deficit view is not a feature of testing, but of a larger institutional culture of placing the responsibility for effective communication on the perceived outsider (the ITA), and eliminating testing will not change that larger culture. Once again, N&E ignore efforts from within the field to train listeners to be better cooperators, like the initiative described in Subtirelu et al. (2022).

The need for experts

One of the responses I often hear from colleagues to criticism against ITA programs is that we are needed because we have the right kind of expertise. N&E, however, decry the need for an “expert authority,” i.e. someone with a linguistics background, in evaluating students, claiming that “language experts’ documentation is not needed to ensure effective communication” because “repair strategies such as repetition and providing additional information,” not “linguistic coursework or IPA notation,” are “what allow different language users to understand each other, even if there are some missteps along the way” (p. 12).

This is to me, one of the sections in N&E’s paper that most strikingly suggest their lack of familiarity with basic foundations of language work. The question of how much explicit instruction language students need is not new and there have indeed been advocates for as little of it as possible. Nevertheless, independent language development requires exposure to vast amounts of language (preferably in an interactive way) and can take a lot of time. For example, Schmitt (2010) presents research showing that vocabulary acquisition through incidental learning is low and might not lead to mastery. What’s more, these “missteps along the way” can be very consequential in high-stakes situations. An expert can guide students on common pitfalls to avoid and can help refine repair strategies. Explicit teaching, as well as tools like IPA notation, thus, can serve as a much needed shortcut to catalyze learning. This expert teaching does not have to serve as a way to impose a dominant standardized variety. It can instead be a powerful way to be aware of multiple ways a language can be used. In fact, linguistic coursework could also be an essential tool in training listeners to be more responsible for their share of communicative labor by understanding their own use of the language side by side with different uses they might find, and expert linguists can have a role in facilitating that too.

Part of the authors’ gripe against the need for linguists is that creating a need for the authority of designated experts can make tests look impartial, “scientific” and thus legitimize the imposition of standardized American English on ITAs by treating its features as commodities in a linguistic marketplace, more valuable than their native languages and cultures. It can also place the burden of learning these features solely onto the ITAs, and those with the resources (for test preparation, for example) to master these features will be regarded as successful and entrepreneurial. N&E see access to these resources as a form of privilege. Nevertheless, linguistic knowledge can save learners precious time and effort in building awareness of variations in language use, and it can be done without the imposition of one variety as superior. Graduate students have time constraints due to the demands of their programs and limited time to graduation. Depending on their personalities, having to seek out natural interactions can be a violent imposition. Moreover, the population profile in their cohorts sometimes means most of their interactions will be in their mother tongue, limiting language exposure even more. With that in mind, it can be claimed that the extended time and access to a speech community required for learning without an expert can involve at least as much privilege as (probably even more than) attending language classes or preparing for tests.

The altruistic shield and our role

When one has developed expertise and dedicated years or even decades to work one sees as essential in helping others fulfill their needs, it can sound offensive and even absurd to hear that this work can be doing harm. In discussing race in ELT, Gerald (2020, 2022) uses the term altruistic shield to describe this “tendency for individuals in professions perceived as prosocial (such as ours) to hide behind our field’s reputation rather than confronting our potential complicity” (2022, p. 57). It is important to not let this shield block sincere reflection about our role in perpetuating practices that might be rooted in harmful ideologies, instead of continuously having to be defensive against criticism from outsiders who might not be fully aware of the intricacies of our field.

Conclusion

While it is the case that much ITA work gained force in response to misguided complaints and legislation in the 1980s, the grim picture of ITA testing painted in N&E seems like a dangerous overgeneralization based on too little data and outdated references. On the other hand, the authors point to systemic faults in the overall screening process of ITAs that merit consideration in designing our programs and especially in how we communicate our goals and practices to stakeholders outside the field. As usual, words matter. For example, talking about variants instead of errors, or standardized instead of correct, can go a long way in conveying that there are multiple legitimate ways of languaging.

It is unfortunate that we live within a system in which the academic machinery still punishes non-standardized language use as deficient. In our role as ITAs’ advocates, we can work to push back against these views, but denying our students the right to know what in their language use will be perceived as deficient is not doing them any favors in helping them reach their academic and professional goals. While we advocate for change, such as more balanced interpretive labor, we need to guide our students in working within this system, unfair as it is.

As for tests, we can continue using them as a convenient way to satisfy administrators’ desire for alleged objectivity, while at the same time striving to design them more equitably and using their outcomes for more productive ends than gatekeeping.

References

Gerald, J. (2020) Combatting the altruistic shield in English language teaching. NYS TESOL Journal, 7(1), 22–25.

Gerald, J. (2022) Antisocial Language Teaching – English and the pervasive pathology of whiteness. Multilingual Matters.

Nagai, J. & Everhart, E. (2022) Oral English proficiency tests, interpretive labor, and the neoliberal university. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 0(0), 1–18.

Schmitt, N. (2010) Researching Vocabulary. Macmillan Palgrave.

Subtirelu, N., Lindemann, S., Acheson, K., & Campbell, M. (2022). Sharing communicative responsibility: Training US students in cooperative strategies for communicating across linguistic difference. Multilingua 41(3).