Language proficiency test

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about my experience of passing a language proficiency test.

Language proficiency tests are complex as they are intended to assess a candidate’s linguistic capability. For this purpose, a language proficiency test has to evaluate different linguistic aspects, such as pronounciation, structure, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and interaction.

Recently, I passed such a language proficiency test and was a little bit surprised about its structure as the time allocated for the different aspects seemed relatively short. The test consisted of two main elements: a speaking and a listening and comprehension part.

During the speaking test, I was required to give a short presentation about an unknown topic and to comment on three different statements. Surprisingly, the expected duration of the presentation was only two to two and a half minutes and so relatively short. However, being able to fluently speak for two and a half minutes can already provide a good indication about the candidate’s ability to express himself in a foreign language as this time is long enough to present a lot of information and to assess the candidate’s language prophiciency. Additionally, increasing the time could result in the problem that the candidate runs out of content and thus is no longer able to keep up the flow of the presentation. This part resulted in a test of the pronounciation, structure, vocabulary and fluency as these linguistic aspect are mostly required during a presentation.

After having completed my presentation, I was confronted with three different statements and had to express my own opinion. Furthermore, the examiners asked some follow-up questions in order to simulate a conversation. This part was intented to assess the candidate’s ability to comprehend and to interact.

Finally, I had to complete the listening and comprehension part which consisted of a multiple-choice test about fifteen different audio files. The multiple-choice test provided one question per audio file and was designed to assess the candidate’s ability to comprehend the content of each audio file. The difficulty of this part was enhanced by the fact that the audio files included different English accents.

Although the whole test seemed to be relatively short, it demanded and tested all of the linguistic aspects.