A test for business

Almost all personnel at The Regent Bangkok are required to take the TOEIC. For the front-desk staff, the TOEIC requirements are understandably very high.

Take a random survey of people around you and chances are heads will nod at the mention of exams like TOEFL, IELTS, or GMAT, but you’ll get blank looks for TOEIC.

Robert Woodhead

Unless, that is, you confine your sample to members of the corporate community. For many of the top globally-oriented companies in Bangkok and elsewhere, the TOEIC is the instrument of choice for tasks ranging from screening the English language proficiency of job applicants to placing employees in language classes.

According to Robert Woodhead, Director of the Center for Professional Assessment, the authorised TOEIC representative for Thailand, an estimated 20,000 people took the test here last year, some more than once. The local client list is extremely diverse, he says, drawn from industries such as aviation, electronics, finance and banking, hotels and tourism and telecommunications.

The TOEIC is a product of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the producer of TOEFL and a host of other well-known standardised tests, such as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

The TOEIC was initially developed for Japan where it was first administered in 1979. “The Ministry of International Trade and Industry there decided that they were looking for a test for people who were out of university and in the work force,” Woodhead explains. “In order to do that they wanted an assessment to test a fairly broad range of language.”

This broad range of language is what sets the TOEIC apart from other standardised English proficiency tests like the TOEFL, Woodhead says.

“The TOEFL’s primary purpose is to determine whether or not people have enough English to go into a North American university without requiring additional language training. So, in a very simplistic form, it’s a pass/fail test.

“The test questions in TOEFL tend to be pushed towards the level that the universities want. There are not as many easy questions. There are not a lot of very difficult questions, but questions tend to be more in the middle range of language ability. That’s simply because if, under the old paper and pencil system, you got, say, a 550 you were in. If you didn’t get a 550, that was the end of the story.”

The TOEIC’s design reflects its very different target audience, Woodhead explains. “Its audience is people who are in a variety of different levels or positions within companies and by the nature of their jobs, their English requirements are going to be different.

“The TOEIC is capable of measuring from a very low range of language – from almost what would be considered memorised ability up through what’s considered functional fluency, the ability to understand almost everything you read and hear. So it’s a very broad range of language,” Woodhead relates.

This, he says, allows a corporation to use a single test for virtually all its employees, making it a particularly useful assessment tool for many different purposes.

“It allows us, for example, to use the TOEIC to help people set language targets for an organisation such as a hotel. Take the people who just answer the door – the doormen at the hotel. The amount of English that they really need to do that is fairly limited. We can measure that with a TOEIC and the TOEIC score requirement is correspondingly rather low.

“But at the front desk where they have to deal with people asking a lot of questions, the requirement for English language is higher and, hence, when we measure with TOEIC, they are required to get a higher score.”

The two-and-one-half-hour TOEIC examination consists of 200 multiple-choice questions. (Examples below.) Scoring ranges from a theoretical low of 10 to a high of 900. The test is divided into two sections: listening comprehension and reading. The listening has four types of questions and the reading section has three.

Whereas the TOEFL derives its material largely from academic contexts, the TOEIC material is drawn largely from work related situations. Test takers, for example, might listen to an announcement set in an airport or they might read an excerpt from a company policy statement.

The listening section, in particular, is designed to capture the broadest range of language proficiency possible. At the lower end, it can get a reading for someone who is functionally illiterate in English.

Komarakul Na Nagara

“What’s unique about the TOEIC,” says Woodhead’s business partner Dr Supalak Komarakul Na Nagara, “is that in the listening, the first two parts are called pure listening. It is probably the only test available that is pure listening where the examinee only has to listen and produce a result.”

For example, the examinee might listen to four statements and choose the one which best describes a picture in the test book. Or the examinee might hear a short statement or question and choose the most appropriate of three spoken responses. This doesn’t make it easy, but neither does it discriminate against those who have little experience in reading the language.

What TOEIC does not claim to do is test an examinee’s speaking and writing proficiency – directly, that is. “We know from research that there are relationships between listening and speaking and reading and writing,” Woodhead observes. “Based on independent research that’s been done on TOEIC, it allows us to make viable projections of what people should be able to do in terms of speaking or writing.”

According to Dr Supalak, the TOEIC can still be useful even when a company deems a speaking score important.

“Why not test your people with TOEIC first and then we can determine who has the greatest probability of being able to speak at the required level? At very low levels, it’s not going to be cost effective to have a one-to-one interview with them. That’s costly and it’s time-consuming,” Dr Supalak suggests.

Writing is very similar, Woodhead says. “Most people, when they say they want people to write, they want them to write at a high level. In that case, you don’t want to be testing people who have TOEIC 300s or 400s or even 500s because research tells us what kind of writing you’re going to get back. You really need people to get into the 600s and 650s before you’re going to see the kinds of writing that you need for most organisations.”

Both Woodward and Dr Supalak are trained and accredited examiners for both speaking and writing, so they can do the testing themselves. In the case of speaking, however, they often use a different approach.

“If the organisation has the in-house capability, we can hold training sessions where we will train their people to administer the test so that they can do it themselves in-house. It then becomes more cost effective for them and easier to deliver,” Woodhead says.

Not surprisingly, clients usually need help in interpreting TOEIC, and Woodhead and Dr Supalak are happy to accommodate.

“Consultation is a standard value-added part of the service,” Woodhead explains. “We don’t want them to just use the test. We want them to be able to use the test for a purpose. And they can’t do that if they don’t understand what the scores mean. So a big part of our responsibility to the client is helping them to understand what the scores mean before they can start using them effectively.

“We work with them usually in advance of even interpreting results, helping them to identify what the levels of language are and what those levels mean first. So that they get a descriptive picture of what they are looking for on a position-by-position or level-by-level basis,” Woodhead relates.

“We will work at different levels with our clients depending on how much, how deep they want the service to go. We have complimentary-level services up to consulting-level services where we’ll actually go in and do paid consulting with them.

“But generally we’ll do an analysis for them. We’ll be able to tell them – if we know, where they want to be – how far away the individuals are and what kind of training they need to get from where they are to where they want to be and how long they should be prepared to have those people do that training.”

One thing that Woodhead stresses they will not do is to recommend a training organisation. “The training process is something we can’t control. If they want, we will go in and we will talk with whatever service provider they decide on. We’ll go in and explain what the results mean and we’ll help them to explain to the service provider what it is our client really wants.”

TOEIC at The Regent Bangkok “I would say we use TOEIC for every position except for an apprentice in the kitchen and stewarding. Even housekeepers take the TOEIC,” says Raksaporn Pichitnorakarn, the Training and Human Resources Manager at The Regent Bangkok. Initially, recounts Mr Raksaporn, the company intended to use TOEIC in the recruitment process with prospective employees taking the TOEIC at their own expense. But given the tight labour supply in the hotel industry, that approach was found to be impractical. “So we modified the system,” Mr Raksaporn says. “We use the TOEIC as a benchmark and as a means to identify training needs. We asked the TOEIC representatives in Thailand to come in and define the level of English competency needed for each position – how much English a person needs to perform in that position. “Now, after a new staff member is hired, we send them out to do the TOEIC test during their probationary period,” he says. Mr Raksaporn has a good understanding of TOEIC results and what they indicate. “Basically, the reading and listening scores should be in balance,” he explains. “But if the reading score is very low and the listening score is good, then we know the person will be weak in grammar. So that will obstruct them in writing or in making presentations at the supervisory levels.” “Listening is often a problem for housekeeping, kitchen staff or servers,” he says. “In those cases, we recommend that they make use of our self-access centre – a small sound lab with different packages of learning materials. It is open 24 hours.” To determine what level of materials the staff members should use, Mr Raksaporn says they use both the TOEIC scores and their own internal English test.

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Last modified: October 6, 2003