THE TOEIC® SPEAKING AND WRITING TESTS: RELATIONS TO TEST‐TAKER PERCEPTIONS OF PROFICIENCY IN ENGLISH

To facilitate the interpretation of test scores from the new TOEIC® speaking and writing tests as measures of English-language proficiency, we administered a self-assessment inventory to TOEIC examinees in Japan and Korea, to gather their perceptions of their ability to perform a variety of everyday English-language tasks. TOEIC scores related relatively strongly to test taker self-reports for both speaking and writing tasks. The results were extraordinarily consistent, with examinees at each higher TOEIC score level being more likely to report that they could successfully accomplish each of the everyday language tasks in English. The pattern of correlations also suggested modest discriminant validity of the new TOEIC speaking and writing measures, suggesting that both measures contribute uniquely to the assessment of English-language proficiency.