JP/P.J.Leo

The new education minister, Nadiem Makarim, has received various suggestions on how to fix our education system. Maybe his nonteaching professional background has encouraged many education practitioners and experts to chip in a provocative suggestion or two.

One such suggestion is bold enough to merit a serious discussion here, namely limiting English language education to elementary schools only. This suggestion was proposed by the Indonesian Teachers’ Association (IGI), which also suggested that English teaching should focus on communication skills rather than the knowledge aspect of English, such as grammar and vocabulary.

However, the IGI seems to overlook a report published by English First International showing that, in 2019, Indonesia ranked 61st in the world-wide English Proficiency Index, well below Vietnam (52nd), Malaysia (26th), Singapore (5th) and the Netherlands (1st). Limiting English language instruction to elementary schools would only worsen this already poor standing.

On the suggestion of focusing on the communication skills in English, the IGI might have failed to notice the fact that our 2013 curriculum and English textbooks already deliver precisely what they want: communication-focused lessons.

Rather than tampering with English education in elementary and high schools, the government can look at the upstream where English proficiency is tested. This is where the TOEFL test enters the picture. But here let us talk about the “TOEFL-like” tests, so called because while the format, scoring and questions are identical to those of the TOEFL, these tests are much cheaper, created and administered locally by universities’ language centers across Indonesia, not by the United States-based English Testing Services.

In most universities, these tests are simply known mistakenly as the TOEFL test. Many employers include these TOEFL-like tests in their recruitment programs. Many, if not all, state universities require their students to get a certain minimum score, such as 450, to be able to attend the graduation ceremony.

In other words, these tests are high-stake in nature. The employers trust the test validity and the universities trust their meaningfulness. But these tests are problematic to say the least.

The first problem with these tests is that they are highly unreliable. One can take the test in a university language center one day and repeat the test next week in the same place with two strikingly different scores.

This happens for the following reasons: A language center usually has more than one version of the TOEFL-like tests, called booklets, to prevent test takers from memorizing the questions and coming back to the same booklet to ace the test.

As these booklets definitely have varying degrees of difficulty, a test taker who happens to take a difficult one will score poorly, while those who happen to take the easier versions will get higher scores. One’s score is thus determined partly by sheer luck.

Ideally, TOEFL-like test providers should empirically and statistically calibrate their booklets, so that regardless of which booklet is taken by the student, the resulting score will be more or less the same. But as far as these institutions are concerned, they hardly, if ever, calibrate their tests. They also do not publish their tests’ statistics such as the validity, reliability and score distribution, making it impossible to assess the test’s usefulness.

Another problem is that these TOEFL-like tests represent a mismatch between what students have learned during their schooling years and what is assessed by these tests.

At least since 2013 the English language curriculum has been geared toward teaching communication skills, especially speaking in different situations to get messages across and to function in global communication.

In harmony with the curriculum, English coursebooks and textbooks used in schools across Indonesia contain materials that train our students the speaking skill. In other words, our students are rightly taught to perform something rather than passively doing receptive skills, such as reading and listening only.

These TOEFL-like tests, however, do not assess students’ speaking ability at all. These tests only assess students’ ability to understand spoken language, to notice correct grammar use, and to understand written texts. It is unfair to test students something different from what the system has prepared them to do, particularly when the test is high-stake and relatively costly.

Students taking the TOEFL-like test are charged at various prices ranging from Rp 50,000 (US$3.56) to Rp 150,000. But many students fail on their first try and must retake the test and thus spend more to qualify for attending the graduation ceremony. Taken together nationally, TOEFL-like tests might generate millions of rupiah annually. This cost is too high for tests that have not been calibrated empirically and are not supported by published reliability and validity statistics. It is therefore urgent for the new education minister to evaluate the use of these tests.

One alternative to the existing TOEFL-like tests is a nationally recognized English test that is aligned with the national curriculum of English language education. Every university would have to use this test in place of the local TOEFL-like tests. Developing, piloting and revising this national English proficiency test will, of course, take a long time.

But the government must start somewhere to reform the English proficiency testing system, as it has done with the Indonesian Language for Foreign Speakers. If the government can create an internationally recognized Indonesian Language Proficiency Test, it should too be able to create an English language proficiency test for Indonesians.

So no, rather than limiting English education to elementary school, we should leave the existing English education alone. Instead, we should do away with TOEFL-like tests, because they are unreliable and incompatible with our national English education curriculum.

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Teacher of language testing and assessment at State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Ampel Surabaya, East Java.

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