Using EIKEN, TOEFL, and TOEIC to Award EFL Course Credits in Japanese Universities

ABSTRACT

Despite the wide use of language tests as a basis for awarding English language course credits at Japanese universities, little has been published about how universities set policies on awarding credits according to external test scores. To narrow this gap, the characteristics of such policies were investigated in relation to the EIKEN Test in Practical English Proficiency (EIKEN), the Test of English as a Foreign Language^TM (TOEFL®), and the Test of English for International Communication^TM (TOEIC®). Analyses of 18 national and 28 private universities showed that each university had a median of 58.50 EFL courses for which credits were offered on the basis of external test scores. Moreover, approximately one-third of cases of credit awarding showed a discrepancy between skills targeted in courses and those measured on the tests used in credit-awarding policies, suggesting that credit awarding based on these proficiency measures seems overall adequate. However, credit-awarding policies were problematic for four-skill (62.44% and 63.37% for national and private universities, respectively) and listening-speaking courses (61.26% and 65.29%). Academic staff responses to the questionnaire revealed some possible reasons EFL course credits could be offered despite gaps between skills targeted in courses and those measured on tests. Implications are provided for the improvement of credit-awarding policies.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics 2014 Conference, Portland, Oregon. We thank the editors, the two anonymous reviewers, Yoshinori J. Watanabe, and Yasuyo Sawaki for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article and the participants for their valuable responses to our questionnaire. This study was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Grant numbers 26370736 and 26370737.

Notes

¹ The TOEIC Speaking and Writing test was not used for awarding credits at any universities investigated.

² The authors attempted to conduct such a study but were unsuccessful because of the difficulty of identifying students who had been exempted from language courses. Such information is rarely available even to insiders; when it is available, it is often kept anonymous.

³ Our results showed that few universities mentioned valid periods for the tests they use for awarding credits.

⁴ The same course offered under a single course name but taught by different instructors was coded as multiple courses. This is because university curricula, even when standardized, do not always mandate that the same syllabus be used across sections of such courses. In fact, each instructor is often provided with some freedom to design a course as they wish. For example, English 200—an intermediate speaking course—is offered by two different instructors: Instructor A, who focuses on speaking (e.g., pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary) in everyday contexts, such as self-introduction and building relationships; and Instructor B, who emphasizes speaking in an integrative manner, as it relates to listening, reading, and writing, and uses videos and newspaper articles to prompt students to discuss current affairs. In other words, Instructor A focuses on speaking only while Instructor B focuses on all four skills. Coding both courses as “speaking” because they are offered under a single course name masks what the syllabus says is actually taught in class. Accordingly, courses were coded on the basis of the content as described in their syllabi, not on the course name. Counting the same course taught by two instructors as one (instead of two) does not consider situations where instructors are allowed to design courses as they wish, even when the name of the course is the same. If courses with the same course name were counted as one, it would lead to inaccuracies when matching skills targeted in courses to those measured on tests.

⁵ The responses were independent across national and private universities (e.g., responses to option [a] by staff in national universities and by those in private universities) and were analyzed by the chi-square test of goodness of fit. There was no statistically significant relationship between the type of university and the frequency of responses for each option.

⁶ This was the case at the time of the search for documents on credit-awarding policies for the current study, from October 2013 through February 2014. As of 2016, institutional programs for the TOEIC Speaking and Writing are available, meaning that organizations (such as universities) that want to administer it can do so at locations of their choice after arrangements with TOEIC in-country representatives. Fees are lower than for public tests. These favorable conditions can help students take the TOEIC Speaking and Writing in addition to the TOEIC Listening and Reading (which has already been made available for institutional programs). The four-skill scores, which are wide in focus, could be used to reduce the frequency of credit-awarding despite skill discrepancies between courses and external tests.