I was intrigued to learn earlier this year that Oxford University Press had launched a new online test of English language proficiency, called the Oxford Test of English (OTE). At the conference where I first heard about it, I was struck by the fact that the presentation of the OUP sponsored plenary speaker was entitled ‘The Power of Assessment’ and dealt with formative assessment / assessment for learning. Oxford clearly want to position themselves as serious competitors to Pearson and Cambridge English in the testing business.
The brochure for the exam kicks off with a gem of a marketing slogan, ‘Smart. Smarter. SmarTest’ (geddit?), and the next few pages give us all the key information.
‘Traditional language proficiency tests’ is presumably intended to refer to the main competition (Pearson and Cambridge English). Cambridge First takes, in total, 3½ hours; the Pearson Test of English Academic takes 3 hours. The OTE takes, in total, 2 hours and 5 minutes. It can be taken, in theory, on any day of the year, although this depends on the individual Approved Test Centres, and, again, in theory, it can be booked as little as 14 days in advance. Results should take only two weeks to arrive. Further flexibility is offered in the way that candidates can pick ’n’ choose which of the four skills they want to have tests, just one or all four, although, as an incentive to go the whole hog, they will only get a ‘Certificate of Proficiency’ if they do all four.
A further incentive to do all four skills at the same time can be found in the price structure. One centre in Spain is currently offering the test for one single skill at Ꞓ41.50, but do the whole lot, and it will only set you back Ꞓ89. For a high-stakes test, this is cheap. In the UK right now, both Cambridge First and Pearson Academic cost in the region of £150, and IELTS a bit more than that. So, faster, more flexible and cheaper … Oxford means business.
The ‘individual experience’ on the next page of the brochure is pure marketing guff. This is, after all, a high-stakes, standardised test. It may be true that ‘the Speaking and Writing modules provide randomly generated tasks, making the overall test different each time’, but there can only be a certain number of permutations. What’s more, in ‘traditional tests’, like Cambridge First, where there is a live examiner or two, an individualised experience is unavoidable.
More interesting to me is the reference to adaptive technology. According to the brochure, ‘The Listening and Reading modules are adaptive, which means the test difficulty adjusts in response to your answers, quickly finding the right level for each test taker. This means that the questions are at just the right level of challenge, making the test shorter and less stressful than traditional proficiency tests’.
My curiosity piqued, I decided to look more closely at the Reading module. I found one practice test online which is the same as the demo that is available at the OTE website . Unfortunately, this example is not adaptive: it is at B1 level. The actual test records scores between 51 and 140, corresponding to levels A2, B1 and B2.
The tasks in the Reading module are familiar from coursebooks and other exams: multiple choice, multiple matching and gapped texts.
According to the exam specifications, these tasks are designed to measure the following skills:
- Reading to identify main message, purpose, detail
- Expeditious reading to identify specific information, opinion and attitude
- Reading to identify text structure, organizational features of a text
- Reading to identify attitude / opinion, purpose, reference, the meanings of words in context, global meaning
The ability to perform these skills depends, ultimately, on the candidate’s knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, as can be seen in the examples below.
How exactly, I wonder, does the test difficulty adjust in response to the candidate’s answers? The algorithm that is used depends on measures of the difficulty of the test items. If these items are to be made harder or easier, the only significant way that I can see of doing this is by making the key vocabulary lower- or higher-frequency. This, in turn, is only possible if vocabulary and grammar has been tagged as being at a particular level. The most well-known tools for doing this have been developed by Pearson (with the GSE Teacher Toolkit ) and Cambridge English Profile . To the best of my knowledge, Oxford does not yet have a tool of this kind (at least, none that is publicly available). However, the data that OUP will accumulate from OTE scripts and recordings will be invaluable in building a database which their lexicographers can use in developing such a tool.
Even when a data-driven (and numerically precise) tool is available for modifying the difficulty of test items, I still find it hard to understand how the adaptivity will impact on the length or the stress of the reading test. The Reading module is only 35 minutes long and contains only 22 items. Anything that is significantly shorter must surely impact on the reliability of the test.
My conclusion from this is that the adaptive element of the Reading and Listening modules in the OTE is less important to the test itself than it is to building a sophisticated database (not dissimilar to the GSE Teacher Toolkit or Cambridge English Profile). The value of this will be found, in due course, in calibrating all OUP materials. The OTE has already been aligned to the Oxford Online Placement Test (OOPT) and, presumably, coursebooks will soon follow. This, in turn, will facilitate a vertically integrated business model, like Pearson and CUP, where everything from placement test, to coursework, to formative assessment, to final proficiency testing can be on offer.
Adaptive Learning in ELT 