I really like this article from Cambridge about “Ethical AI for language learning and assessment.” If I were trying to position the IELTS to thrive in today’s brave new world, this is the sort of message I would use. I would express that the test is keeping up with the times, but that the makers of the test take a more cautious and thoughtful approach than its competitors. Sounds easy, right? Perhaps not. Monday I’ll write about some not-helpful articles out of Cambridge that will get in front of many more sets of eyeballs in the days ahead.
This month I read the March 21, 2024 issue of the London Review of books. A few articles caught my attention
“I Adjure You Egg” is a short history of magical amulets and charms in medieval Europe. A really fun exploration of a corner of European history we don’t often hear about. People believed in such charms with a lot of sincerity, for a very long time. It was interesting to know that charms were often scraps of written words rather than some object with more physicality, which is what we often picture when we think of charms.
“Llamas, Pizzas, Mandolins” is a long look at AI and its implications. Yeah, you are probably sick of this topic, but it is one that many still want to read about. And I bet it will be asked about on the TOEFL for some time to come.
After that, I read “Assessing Academic English for Higher Education” by John M. Norris and Xiaoming Xi of ETS. As I think I mentioned in an earlier column I am working my way through all of the books on my shelf (about tests or otherwise) that I have actually paid for with my own money. This one has been on my shelf for a couple of years at least. This was the perfect time to read it, as it serves as a sort of coda for the “old ETS” before the TOEFL gets blown up into something unrecognizable and mostly unconnected from what came before. The book is almost sorrowful, as it describes page after page of good research and good ideas about assessing English for academic purposes that never made it into the TOEFL iBT. Instead of using these ideas, ETS just sort of left the test in its original form, basically unchanged for two decades. It is no wonder that so many bright minds left to build the Duolingo English Test.
Finally, I read Richard Sennett’s “The Corrosion of Character,” a short book (really an essay) about work at the turn of this century. There is some stuff in here that ETSers might appreciate too, especially about the futility of companies trying to reform into something new by “reengineering” themselves. I was going to quote a relevant part of the book, but it was too long. So here’s a dramatic reading:
This part may hit home:
“…institutions become dysfunctional during the people-squeezing process: business plans are discarded and revised, expected benefits turn out to be ephemeral; the organization loses direction. Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit is suddently sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back into the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself.”
