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f one takes a critical look at the purpose of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), one may find it difficult to fathom the rationale behind the Trade Ministry’s plan to compel its civil servants to take the test and to obtain a minimum score of 600.

We need to understand at the outset that having a TOEFL score is an absolute requirement for non-native English students (or international students) wishing to pursue their studies in US universities.

The TOEFL is a tool or instrument used to measure how proficient prospective international students are in terms of their English language competence, especially competence in traditional language skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing.

 Thus, the test was originally designed to satisfy academic requirements set by universities in the US. This is reflected in the contents of the test, which are academically oriented by their very nature. In other words, the purpose of the test is to obtain an overall picture of academic readiness of foreign students in participating in an academic setting where English is the sole medium of interaction.

In a foreign language context like ours, the TOEFL has long been misused for serving relatively high-stake purposes such as for the screening of students applying for university entrance, for the placement of students in English language courses, for the screening of job applicants entering workplaces and more recently, for the boosting of civil servants’ working performance.

It seems that the appeal of the TOEFL as a standardized worldwide-used test has made us succumb to it in the making of high stake decisions.

Yet, the sense of the test having been tried out a posteriori to a certain target population (for example with test takers) is no guarantee that it will be valid if applied to a completely different situation for serving totally different purposes.

Before we call into question the requirement of obtaining a minimum score of 600, the basic question we can raise is this: is the TOEFL, which is used mainly for academic purposes, a valid measure for establishing the overall English language proficiency of the Trade Ministry’s staff?

 A cursory look at the contents of the TOEFL and rumination over its relevance to the staff’s needs leads one to argue that the test is more likely to be out of sync with their current level of English proficiency. As such, it is unrealistic to set a minimum standard of requiring them to obtain a score of 600.

What many, if not most, laymen often fail to understand is that certain sections tested in the TOEFL are a kind of indirect measure of one’s underlying language ability in standard written English. For instance, the so-called error recognition section, in which the test takers have to identify the grammatical errors of a sentence, is designed to indirectly measure one’s writing competence.

The assumption undergirding this indirect measure is that the more one is able to identify the incorrect language elements in the sentences given, the more likely he/she will able to write in Standard English.

Yet, no evidence substantiating this assumption exists. It has been found instead that those who score the highest in the error recognition section are still not able to write good essays in Standard English. This indicates that there is no one-to-one correlation between the ability to identify grammatical errors and the ability to write an essay.

Do the overall TOEFL scores truly reflect one’s English language proficiency? Clearly, one’s proficiency in English is too complex to be measured by TOEFL alone. Indeed, we can never be confident that our inference of one’s language abilities within a short period of time is complete and precise.

Similarly, we cannot assure ourselves that the scores obtained from a single test instrument, no matter how standardized, sophisticated and valid a test is, totally represent test takers’ true language abilities.

We shouldn’t dismiss the possibilities that even a standardized test like the TOEFL has the potential to be biased and is thus uncongenial to our situation.

Given the caveats above, the Trade Ministry will be doing its staff a great disservice if most high-stake decisions are made simply by using staffs’ TOEFL scores as a reference.

For the sake of boosting civil servants’ working performance in an era of high competitiveness, English proficiency is badly called for. No one doubts it.

However, such an effort shouldn’t be realized by setting an ambitious, yet unrealistic standard that requires civil servants to get a score of 600 on the TOEFL.

There are plenty of viable and less tedious ways of improving one’s English proficiency, the creation of a self-initiated English reading club in one’s workplaces being one of them.

 This club, which can be a potential site free of the psychological pressure of test taking and the other pressures of academic activities, should become a place where its members can experiment with a new language (i.e. English) by, for instance, conversing in it with colleagues about any topics of interest from what they read.

This is not an unreasonable proposal because, as far as a second language acquisition theory is concerned, people can acquire a second language (English) with ease and with hardly any effort provided that a basic requirement is satisfied: learners study the language in a low-anxiety environment.

The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University. He is also chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.