VietTESOL International Convention 2026

With non-native speakers now vastly outnumbering native speakers of English worldwide, the sociolinguistic landscape of global English use has fundamentally shifted. Yet dominant high-stakes proficiency tests like IELTS and TOEFL continue to assess English against Inner Circle norms. While both tests have undergone documented reforms and produced substantial new official documentation between 2022 and 2026, the extent to which these reforms reflect genuine construct change remains unexamined. This study applies Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis framework to a corpus of 18 official documents, including band descriptors, technical manuals, validity reports, and score user guides, to investigate what has and has not changed in how both tests construct and justify their ideas of English proficiency. The analysis reveals that IELTS continues to define its highest performance level by reference to “native speaker speech” and “natural” language control, terms that remain unchanged across its most recent documents. TOEFL, by contrast, has removed native-speaker reference from its 2024 rubrics, yet its Technical Manual still grounds proficiency in Inner Circle academic contexts and its listening input draws exclusively on four Inner Circle accent varieties. Across both tests, both tests claim to serve 'all test takers' while, in practice, only recognizing English varieties from a handful of Inner Circle countries. Together, these findings suggest that recent reforms amount to changes in how both tests present themselves rather than in what they actually measure, and that meaningful reform requires intervention at the level of construct definition rather than rubric wording.