Every now and then we come across a new acronym related to the teaching of English. Our first reaction is to wonder whether we really need yet another one. Then, taking a more positive view, we see it as perhaps a sign of vitality-of the constant changes and refinements that occur as our profession progresses. In any case, a glance at the following list yields a kind of history of English teaching in our times. As a follow-up to this fairly inclusive but less than exhaustive list, we invite readers to share with us any important acronyms we may have omitted, differences in interpretation of those listed, and other pertinent questions or remarks on the subject.

ELT: English Language Teaching. What Peter Strevens has called "the [probable] proto-TEFL term" dates back to the early 1940s.

(T)EFL: (The Teaching of) English as a Foreign Language. This seems to have been the first distinctive term for the teaching of English as a foreign language, as opposed to a native language or a second language. Its use dates from the mid-1940s. (T)ESL: (The Teaching of) English as a Second Language. In its earliest use, this term was not always sharply differentiated from TEFL. Later, the difference in meaning between TEFL and TESL became more distinct. In fact, TESL has come to have two quite different meanings: (1) the teaching of English to students in countries where English is an official or quasi-official language, and (2) the teaching of English to foreign learners in countries where the native language is English, such as the United States, Great Britain, etc. This dual usage continues to bea source of confusion.

(T)ESOL: (The Teaching of) English to Speakers of Other Languages. Because of the awkwardness of the inclusive phrase English as a Second or Foreign Language (or TEFLITESL). much used in the early 1960s, and the need of a suitable name for the professional organization that came into being in the mid-1960s (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), this acronym was agreed on as a general enough term to cover both situations Perhaps because of its particularized use as the name of an organiza

tion, its use as a general cover term for the profession has never altogether replaced TEFL/TESL.

EST: English for Science and Technology. Because of the specialized need for English in technical and scientific fields in many places, this term came into widespread use quite early. ESP: English for Special Purposes or English for Specific Purposes. This broader term (with Specific ultimately replacing the earlier Special) included EST as well as other specific areas of specialization. It became current in the early 1970s, reflecting an interest in tailoring the content of courses more efficiently to the needs of different groups of learners.

EAP: English for Academic Purposes. This relates to the specific needs of learners who need English for higher education. Like EST, it describes a particular subset of ESP.

EOP: English for Occupational Purposes. Like EST and EAP, a subset of ESP.

TTSE: Technical, Technological, and Scientific English. A term used by Peter Strevens in the late 1970s in preference to "scientific English" or "technical English" because of its three-part distinction between science, technology, and technical services.

EWL: English as a World Language. Andrew Conrad and Joshua Fishman gave this term prominence in 1977 in The Spread of English. William Samarin had noted in 1962 that "English...already meets many of the requirements of a true world lingua franca."

ELS: English as a Language of Study. To the best of our knowledge, this term was first used by Albert Marckwardt in the early 1970s to characterize situations in which English plays a specialized role in higher education, although it may not be the language of instruction at lower (and perhaps not even at higher) school levels. EIAL: English as an International Auxiliary Language. This term was proposed by Larry Smith in the RELC Journal of December 1975, to reflect the facts that (1) English is used by people of different nations to communicate with one another and (2) English is a language (other than the native language) sometimes used by nationals

of a country to communicate with one another. This proposal was part of an attempt to find a more convenient and accurate term than the compounded EFL/ESL. At a conference on English for cross-cultural communication held at the East-West Center in April 1978, certain objections to the word auxiliary caused it to be changed to intranational. EIIL: English as an International and Intranational Language. See EIAL. ElIP: English for International and Intranational Purposes.

EIL: English as an International Language. EIL has recently been defined as "that English, in all its linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects, which is used as a vehicle for communication between non-native speakers only, as well as between any combination of native and non-native speakers" (Larry Smith and Richard Via, "English as an International Language via Drama Teaching," World Language English, 1, 2 [Feb. 1982]).

ELWC: English as a Language of Wider Communication. This term is generally used for situations where English is required internationally but not intranationally.

LFE: Local Forms of English. Used by Strevens in 1978 as "a technical term to refer to an identifiable version of English associated with a given community of English-users."

(T)EAL: (The Teaching of) English as an Additional Language. An EAL situation, as defined by Elliot Judd (TESOL Quarterly, 15, 1 [March 1981]) is "one in which speakers learn English after learning another primary language . . . for... communicating with others who have different primary languages."

Certain additional acronyms have arisen in the United States, relating mostly to the teaching of English to native speakers of a dialect different from the "standard" dialect. Among these are: TENES (Teaching English to Native English Speakers), ESD (English as a Second Dialect), SESD (Standard English as a Second Dialect), and (T)ESOD ([Teaching] English to Speakers of Other Dialects). Also, a term that may be the current ultimate in breadth and generality: (T)ESOLD ([Teaching] English to Speakers of Other Languages and Dialects). TENES, anyone?

-A.C.N.

Oral Testing:
Getting a
Sample of
Real Language

LINDA LOMBARDO

Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali, Rome

For the past ten years, LINDA LOMBARDO has been teaching English as a Foreign Language to students in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali in Rome, Italy. She has also had experience teaching EFL in elementary and secondary schools, as well as to adults in professional settings. Her special interests are researching and developing communicative tests and the teaching of reading strategies. She is currently working on a Master's degree in TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Many of us have recently opted for a teaching syllabus which is a blend of structural and notional-functional. We want our students to be able to manipulate structures and put together their own sentences, and, at the same time, we want them to be able to use language in real communicative situations. And, of course, we want to be sure they have acquired enough vocabulary to be able to do both. As the school year hurries by, we try not to lose sight of priorities, we make decisions about when to delve more deeply and when to move on, and remind ourselves daily not to forget to respond to the students we have in front of us and to let some of the order of things be determined by where they need or want to go next. At the end of the course, we are faced with the difficult task of evaluating what has happened. We need to know to what extent students have learned what the course focused on (achievement), where they now stand, so to speak, with the language (proficiency), and where they need to go next (diagnostic).

A paired-communication test

This article describes an experiment in oral testing which aimed at providing information in these three areas. The students tested were Italian university students at an intermediate level of English. To avoid the artificial and often inhibiting teacher-student setup, it was decided that students would be paired and asked to communicate with each other. They were asked either to solicit or to provide information in situations similar to those they had encountered in the classroom, in order to insure a degree of familiarity with the related vocabulary and provide an opportunity for using specific structures that had been practiced during the course. (It was necessary to use a variety of situations and tasks as parallel forms of the same test, since the Italian university is organized around an oral examination system which is open, and students typically sit in on each other's examinations.) Each of the paired students was given a different set of instructions so that completion of the task required a degree of interaction. At the same time, the test situation was left open enough to allow for a certain amount of student initiative and ingenuity in working through the exchange. Students were consulted in the elaboration of a simple rating scale, which they had a chance to try out on each other prior to the day of the test.

Since intervention by the teacher-examiner during the test itself would be kept to a minimum, the test had to be carefully structured through written instructions to the students. These were prepared beforehand by the teacher, who attempted in this way to elicit a representative language sample and, at the same time, make the tasks required of each of the two students equally difficult and approximately equivalent to those of all the other pairs of students. Another purpose of the instructions was to make each student feel responsible for everything that was said during the exchange, so that students would be even more motivated to really listen to

each other. The following are examples of the types of instructions given to students:

Student A: You are at a party at a friend's house when you see a girl you want to meet. Introduce yourself and tell her something about yourself. Then ask her some questions about herself. At the end of the conversation, invite her to have something to drink.

Be prepared to describe the girl afterwards to a friend and to tell the friend how you met and what she said. Student B: You are at a party at a friend's house when a boy you have never seen before begins talking to you. Listen to what he says and answer his questions as you like. Then ask him some questions too.

At the end of the conversation, be prepared to describe the boy to a friend and to tell the friend how you met and what he said.

Student A: You are interviewing a first-year student at this university in order to write an article for the school newspaper. Get information about where the person was born, about his or her family, interests, free time, and career plans. Then find out what he or she thinks of this university.

At the end, be prepared to summarize what the other student said.

Student B: You are a first-year student at this university. Another student wants to interview you in order to write an article for the school newspaper. Answer his or her questions. Give extra information where you can. Finally, ask the other student two questions.

At the end, be prepared to tell a friend what the other student asked you during the interview.

Student A: You are a policeman or a policewoman. A person comes to you to report that a friend has disappeared. Ask the person to describe the friend. Then ask where and when s/he1 last saw this friend, what the friend was wearing at the time, and what s/he thinks could have happened, etc.

At the end, repeat what the person told you, to be sure you have understood.

Student B: A good friend of yours has disappeared. You can't find him or her at home or at school, and no one has seen him or her recently. You go to the police to report that your friend is missing. Describe your friend and answer the questions the policeman or policewoman asks you.

At the end, ask the policeman or policewoman two questions.

Student A: Mr. Brown was killed in his home in Rome between 10 P.M. and midnight last night. You are a detective questioning a person who knew him. Get all the information you can about this person's relationship with Mr. Brown. Then ask him or her where s/he was yesterday evening, with whom, at what time, etc., so you can decide if s/he could be the killer.

1.EDITOR'S NOTE: s/he = he/she = he or she.

At the end, repeat what the person told you, to be sure you have understood.

Student B: Mr. Brown, a friend of yours, was killed in his home in Rome last night. A detective wants to ask you some questions. Answer his or her questions and volunteer extra information where you can.

At the end, ask the detective two questions.

Evaluating the students' performance

Students were to be rated from one to four on each of four different criteria, where l = unsatisfactory, 2=fair, 3 = good, and 4 = very good. The four criteria for evaluating (two of them content-related, two of them performance-related) were: QUANTITY OF COMMUNICATION, defined as the amount of relevant information that the student succeeded in conveying; QUALITY OF COMMUNICATION, defined as the complexity and appropriateness of the student's utterances; ACCURACY, defined as the correctness of the student's utterances; and FLUENCY. defined as overall smoothness, continuity, and naturalness of the student's speech (adapted from Bartz, 1979:18-22).

On the day of the test, students were paired at random, just before they received their instructions. It was found that less time was wasted if the two students to be examined together were seated on opposite sides of the room and given their slips of paper about ten minutes prior to the test, usually just as the two students before them were about to begin. This gave them a chance to read the instructions carefully and think about what they were going to do, settling themselves psychologically into the context described. In this way, too, if students had no questions before beginning the test, they could be asked to give back the slips of paper with the instructions on them, and thus be forced to depend on themselves and concentrate on interacting with the other student. During the test itself, the students' chairs were turned towards each other so that the teacherexaminer, assisted by another teacher functioning as an examiner, became the observer in a very real sense of the word. She rarely intervened, except on one or two occasions when a student asked for a word that was felt to be essential for communication (one of the other students present was able to supply it in one case), or in a few instances, to ask the student who was listening for clarification of something his partner had just said: if he had understood, he was asked to explain it, while if he was not sure, he was instructed to ask his partner to explain it.

During the evaluation, which was done during and immediately after the test, the teacher-examiners had a checklist of things to be looking for: Can the student ask questions and use verb tenses correctly? Can he effectively describe, narrate, inform, or explain? Was he able to get into, through, and out of a situation smoothly? Did he initiate, innovate, emphasize to make a point? Was he logical, appropriate, interesting?

Some observed results

One of the most striking results of this test was the large sample of language it succeeded in eliciting. Students tended to get involved in the task to such an extent that they wanted to continue past the time allotted, and in several cases, the examiners actually had to interrupt students before they were "finished." (See RoosWijgh 1978:110.) In one instance, where the first student-the witness-had to explain from a map how an accident had taken place, and the second student-the policeman was to draw his own map from the explanation he heard, the first student had interpreted the street in the original diagram as being one-way but had failed to make this clear to his partner, who drew the logical conclusion about which driver was at fault on the basis of it being a two-way street; both students insisted on continuing in order to clear up the resulting confusion, even though the examiners had indicated that they were satisfied with the students' performance. On the whole, students asked for more information than the instructions called for; as, for example, when they pursued a particular point their partner had brought up. In the same way, they tended to provide information that went beyond what they had been specifically asked for, thus making the exchange more real, less predictable.

In addition to a noticeable willingness to communicate, there seemed to be more experimentation, greater spontaneity, and less blocking when the students were talking to each other. There was not the visible cringing that some students exhibit when the teacher-examiner is the one asking the questions. Perhaps this was because students were comparing their English with their partner's instead of with a native speaker's, and so felt more encouraged and less inhibited. This feeling of being freed up to communicate sometimes took the form of more space for thinking, humor, and ingenuity, so that the student reporting the disappearance of his friend is able to say: “I think he was . . . (to the teacherexaminer) how do you say rapito (kidnapped)? He's not rich, so I don't understand." Another example is the store detective who asks the customer for a bribe to locate his lost wallet. (These are also indications of the students' close identification with the tasks, as they brought them into their own cultural context, Italy, where kidnapping is a national problem, and Rome, where corruption is sometimes viewed as the norm.) And the detective investigating a murder says emphatically to the suspect: "You have not alibi. You killed him!", to which the suspect replies: "I go to walk my dog every night at 10:30 P.M. The neighbors see me. They can say you.' Students often took the initiative, even when it was not part of their role, and showed a general willingness to collaborate with each other and to take risks. The girl who meets the boy at the party, noticing his awkwardness, makes suggestions like "So,

2

2. EDITOR'S NOTE: Standard English would, of course, be: You don't have (or haven't) an alibi. . . . They can tell you.

would you like to see me again?", and the boy, encouraged, is able to say, "You are free tomorrow? Yes? When?" And the actor who is interviewed by the journalist offers to explain the (complicated!) plot of his latest film.

Students' and examiners' reactions

For the most part, students seemed to feel quite pleased with themselves, and it was obvious they felt their English had been tested. They were enthusiastic and even had fun taking the test (a new experience for most students!). No doubt, much of the interest was generated by the way in which the interaction was set up: with each student aware that he needed something from his partner; by the element of surprise, since each student had different information to begin with and was free to improvise; by the game-like quality of roleplaying; and the challenge inherent in the situation or task itself all these things combined with the natural exuberance of a group of 19- and 20-year-olds who know each other and have been working together in similar ways over the previous six months. But even so, all of these factors cannot completely account for the extremely high level of involvement. Although the teacher-examiner was free to call on a student for a summary, to decide how far to pursue it, or even to probe a particular point at the end of the student exchange, the students knew that the main part of the test was in their hands, and it was perhaps this sense of control that gave them greater confidence and allowed them to show off their English. In other words, there were no victims, only active agents.

As far as the teacher-examiners were concerned, the administration of this test required less expertise in testing and less experience working together, as the teacher who constructed the test had already decided what was fair to ask of these particular students, and during the testing both examiners were able to concentrate on evaluating, since they had been freed, for the most part, from the job of having to elicit. Aside from concentrating the examiners' energies, this method of testing actually saved on examiner fatigue, and where a large number of students had to be tested on the same day, the danger of an examiner drying up during the course of the testing was minimized. Even when the same situation was used more than once, it was new to the students being tested and they were motivated to perform. Their enthusiasm, as well as the different turns the interaction took depending on the different personalities of the students involved, made it easier for the examiners to continue beyond the point where, in the past, they might have felt they were going downhill. The question of validity

Although the testing experience described was satisfying, both from the viewpoint of the students, who seemed to consider it fair, fun, and challenging, and from the viewpoint of the examiners, who were pleas