Nearly 500 Chinese people will take part in the first ever online TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) tests across 19 test centers in the six cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hangzhou and Chengdu on Friday (Sep 15).

"The TOEFL Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT), lasting for four hours from 4:00 p.m. tomorrow, will assess the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills of test takers," said Paul Ramsey, senior vice president in charge of the global business of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of the United States.

It will be the first time the TOEFL iBT has been used on the Chinese mainland and replaces the paper-based TOEFL test, which has been practiced in China for 25 years.

"The technology used in TOEFL iBT enables test items to be delivered over the Internet simultaneously across all time zones, thus increasing our already high test security," said Ramsey.

"It also ensures unbiased testing by recording responses electronically and sending them to a network of ETS human raters who objectively score the responses for maximum reliability," he added.

"Compared with the previous paper-based and computer-based formats across the world, the current TOEFL iBT focuses on speaking, which is generally considered the Achilles heel of Chinese students," said Li Ding, a teacher at New Oriental School, China's biggest English training institute. "And the new test no longer has grammatical items that Chinese students are usually strong in."

The content of the test will also include the kind of English used in higher education, such as in lectures, discussions, reading assignments and term papers, said Maurice Cogan Hauck, assessment director of the ETS.

"In addition to the changes in content, many of us are not familiar with the long testing time and the method of online testing," said Liu Li, a college student from Beijing due to take the test.

"The flexibility of Internet-based testing will help expand Chinese students' access to the ETS's world renowned assessments at test centers across China," said Dai Jiagan, President of China's National Education Examination Authority (NEEA).

TOEFL iBT may be helpful to Chinese students, because the test will provide information about test takers' performance and diagnostic feedback that helps identify learning needs, said professor Zhou Yanhui with South China Agricultural University.

On March 8, 2006, ETS and NEEA signed a seven-year contract in the ETS headquarters in New Jersey, appointing NEEA as the exclusive provider of operational test services for the Internet-based TOEFL and GRE exams in China.

Since it was first introduced in North America in September 2005, ETS's TOEFL iBT has now been launched across the world. So far, ETS has completed 14 TOEFL iBT test administrations in the countries where the test has launched. More than 33,000 students have taken the test and approximately 48,000 students have registered to take the test, said Paul Ramsey.

In China, NEEA will arrange 17 other TOEFL iBTs before the end of December this year for nearly 10,000 test takers, and about 30 to 40 such tests next year, said Dai Jiagan. Previously, China arranged about five paper-based tests each year.

TOEFL has been written, developed and administered since 1964 by ETS, a private, non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey that was founded in 1947. The TOEFL test measures the ability of non-native speakers of English to use and understand North American English.

So far, more than 6,000 colleges and universities in 110 countries rely on TOEFL test scores to measure the English-language skills of their students.

According to NEEA, in recent years around 70,000 Chinese college students per year have taken TOEFL to get access to postgraduate programs at U.S. universities, accounting for about one tenth of the world's total.

Editor: Wing