I was approached the other day by a company in the Hsinchu Science Park requesting me to ‘interview’ some employees to determine their levels of spoken English. As I’m a certified Oxford UCLES BEC oral examinar, I agreed thinking I could use Oxford’s testing criteria like interactive communication, grammar and vocab, pronunciation and discourse management to determine their levels of spoken English.
Silly me! I then got a phone call a couple of hours later from the same company saying they want me to use their employees’ TOEIC scores to determine their levels of spoken English, because “it is what ‘ABC English Centre’ does.” Maybe I missed the boat a long time ago because, as far as I know, TOEIC has only a listening and reading component. Maybe someone clever has devised a conversion table to convert TOEIC scores (say 750) into a conversation band (say B)?
I told the company that I’m not aware of such a ‘scheme’ (because that’s what I think it is)and that the idea of converting a lisening and reading comprehension score into a spoken English score sounds insane to me. But then, who am I? What do I know? Perhaps I didn’t see the business opportunity knocking? Determine a student’s level of spoken English without actually speaking to him/her in person and pocket the money. God! What’s wrong with me?
Does this sound like another one of those ‘quick fixes’ to you guys? You know the "we-don’t-want-to-waste-time-and-money-on doing-things-the-proper-way-because-there-is-a-quick-way-to-learn-English-in 5 minutes-a-day-without-actually-going-to-class syndrome?
I might be wrong. If so, please excuse my ignorance. Should find another job.