COMMENTARY: An Analysis of a Language Test for Employment: The Authenticity of the PhonePass Test

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of Ordinate Corporation's PhonePass Spoken English Test–10. The company promotes this product as being a useful assessment tool for screening job candidates' ability in spoken English. In the real-life domain of the work environment, one of the primary target language use tasks involves extended production responses. This includes interaction with the clients, responding to customers, and so forth. What is germane here is the question, does the domain of the test tasks found in the PhonePass Spoken English Test–10 correspond to the real-life domain of nontest tasks? Thus the rationale for my using the framework of language task characteristics outlined by Bachman and Palmer (1996) and the Test Fairness framework proposed by Kunnan (2004) as guides for an analysis to see if the target language domain of this test is something that the test taker is likely to face in the real-life domain of a work environment.