The Performance of Iranian IELTS Candidates: A Descriptive Study

General proficiency assessment remains to be a very demanding issue in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Despite the existence of a wide variety of accredited general English language tests, the majority of educational and vocational institutions still prefer to screen their applicants through the two widely known exams of TOEFL and particularly !ELTS (the International English Language Testing System) which is capable of evaluating the candidates' ability to perform different tasks via the four language skills. The present study aims at investigating the performance of a group of 500 Iranian Academic and General Training candidates who have sat for IELTS in Iran. The statistical analyses indicate that most unexpectedly Iranian EFL learners have their best performance in speaking and are particularly weak at listening, which happens to be the best predictor of their general language proficiency. Furthermore, it can be claimed that Academic applicants do not significantly perform better than General Training applicants.