چکیده:
The role of language proficiency in EAP test performance is a hotly contested issue in the field, and, more specifically, disciplinary distance is assumed to mediate such a relationship. The purpose of this study was twofold: a) to investigate the role of English proficiency in teacher-constructed ESAP tests serving achievement purposes; and b) to examine whether with variations in disciplinary distance the role of language proficiency would fluctuate. To this aim, 110 English majors were given TOEFL followed by four ESAP tests: law and psychology as neighbor and chemistry and geology as non-neighbor disciplinary fields. Data analyses revealed that there were statistically significant differences across proficiency levels, and the participants took advantage of their proficiency stock more, and statistically so, when sitting for disciplinarily close rather than distant ESAP tests. Also, the positive effect of disciplinary adjacency was not bound to any linguistic thresholds. Except for geology, moderate to large positive correlations were found between proficiency and ESAP test scores. Findings and implications are discussed vis-à-vis studies addressing the role of language proficiency in EAP assessment in general and ESAP assessment in Iran in particular.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Whether Iranian EAP teacher-testers develop test items resembling knowledge tests in nature or more general English like item types or manage to strike a healthy balance between focus-on-language and focus-on-content, we know little about key pertinent issues clustering around such tests and Iranian ESAP students’ performance on them.
Krekeler (2006) gives a long list of studies in which English proficiency, compared to topic familiarity, accounts for more of students’ performance on not only EAP tests of reading comprehension, but also tests of other language skills, such as listening, speaking and writing.
Studies by Salmani-Nodoushan (2003) and Taghizadeh Vahed and Alavi (2019) are related to the role language proficiency and disciplinary distance play in Iranian students’ performances on ESAP tests.
Although the beneficial and advantageous effects of higher English proficiency levels have been acknowledged and documented in EAP tests of academic reading in general (Salmani-Nodoushan, 2003) and the findings of this study lend further support to the role of L2 proficiency in ESAP test performance, the tests used in this study were teacher-constructed achievement tests and, by definition, such tests were “internal to the course” (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987, p.
This seems to be congruent with earlier studies acknowledging the facilitative role of background knowledge (Chen & Graves, 1995; Ridgway, 1997; Birjandi, Alavi & Salmani-Nodoushan, 2002; & Papajohn, 1999; Afghari & Tavakoli, 2004) in EAP tests of reading and listening comprehension.
g. IELTS & TEEP) and national tests (see Olaofe, 1994 for Nigeria; In’nami, Koizumi & Nakamura, 2016 for Japan; and, Lumley & Qian, 2003 for Hong Kong) serving academic proficiency purposes elbowing achievement EAP/ESAP tests to the periphery.