As an international student applying to a college in the United States, in addition doing everything that domestic students would have to do, I had to prove my proficiency in the English language. Such proof comes in many forms, but as my high school was taught entirely in Vietnamese, my only option was through standardized testing. There are two main options. IELTS stands for the International English Language Testing System, scored out of 9 with 0.5 increments, and based off of the British classification system of proficiency. TOEFL, the one I opted for, is abbreviated from the title of this blog entry, scored in natural numbers up to 120, and is assumed to be preferable because of its affiliation with College Board.

While functionally equivalent, the two tests target different skills. IELTS aims at academic usage of the English language, embedded in the way the notorious Task 1 essay of the Writing portion asks people to describe a diagram with formal language, or how the Speaking section is quasi-argumentative. TOEFL, on the other hand, emphasizes heavily on everyday contexts of language use. In the Listening section you are only allowed one time to listen and answer a series of undisclosed questions; in the Writing section, writing concisely is rewarded as grading is based on penalizing mistakes. With subtle discrepancies, the distribution of test results varies, especially for Vietnamese students. It is relatively more straightforward to get to 7.5 or 8.0 out of 9.0 in IELTS through simply mimicking writing samples or practicing patterns of speech; getting a perfect IELTS score is almost impossible to train for. Alternatively, preparation for TOEFL boils down to acquainting oneself with the testing format. Getting to three digits of TOEFL score correlates with a significant increase in the comfort of socializing in the English language; scores between 110 and 120 are indistinguishable from one another.

I take a lot of pride in the distinction of English as a Foreign Language from English as a Second Language. ESL is a perfectly valid definition and an ever-expanding field of education in the United States. In Vietnam, however, even getting the chance to participate in the English-speaking world moves you up an income bracket. Practicing English is confined to the two-hour extra class windows that one’s family pays for to cram in all the irregularities in vocabulary, grammar, and speech of the language. Learning English, for many pupils, is forcing themselves to memorize words no one around them pronounce correctly, while learning at least eleven other subjects in grade school. Hosting extra school to teach English is such a lucrative field that it has been my backup plan for life since tenth grade. To illustrate, my ninth grade extra school teacher earns fifty times more than my engineer father, give or take.

I was not too aware of how my journey with the English language differed from others before I entered high school. I started very young, at a weekly center hosted one street over from my elementary school, learning textbooks “Let’s Go” and “Get Set Go.” My earliest recollection of using English as an advantage was when my teacher for one semester at that English center told my parents I spoke with indiscernible accent, and visited my house several times to coach me just because I was (wink) a pleasant in class (wink). For most of K-12 education, nonetheless, speaking is the least of everyone’s concern when it comes to competitively evaluate students’ proficiency. Beyond a phased-out phonetics testing section, speaking did not come up again until you reach the National English Competition for Gifted Students.

And this is where my trajectory took a turn. Explaining how the Gifted system works in Vietnam requires elegies (I will link it here when I eventually write about it), but in essence the goal for students selected for the Gifted class is to win top placements at the National Competition, which serves as pre-selection for International Olympiads in the sciences. The English bracket exam contains four listening exercises, 20 multiple choice collocation questions, a word formation (etymological derivations) problem, 10 open cloze (fill in the blank a word that makes contextual sense) questions, perhaps a spot-the-word-use-error problem, four page-long reading practices, three essays, and a five-minute speaking section. It necessitates much more cohesive command of the English language than either the TOEFL or the IELTS, so it comes as no surprise that people in my class typically score at least an 8.0 on the IELTS on their first try.

Our curriculum is then engineered to maximize our performance in the exam: one year before we are eligible for entry, we have to take two exams with similar formats but even harder contents to even qualify for the school selection. The truth is, most of this content is very repetitive to study for, and quickly reveals its diminishing returns. It is no different than preparing for the SAT or the ACT, except you do not even learn small factoids about world history every so often. A common trope of every iteration of the English team in my high school is that we spend class time doing test prep for American college admissions, and still win highest prizes at the national rounds. There has never been any year wherein the Hanoi team stray out of the top 5, and based on our previous performances our team roster is always permitted the maximum number of slots. The administration in my high school lacks any motivation to change this, as it doubles the reputation students bring to the school without them exerting an ounce of effort.

My specific class, however, had an even more specialized curriculum. We had a teacher who had been well-known among overseas-education enthusiasts for his English Literature background, officially teaching our team for the first time. Instead of asking us to match phrasal verbs, he would assign us reflection papers on Sophocles, host a class discussion on Paris is Burning, and opine about the intricacies of Henri Bergson’s dureé. Suddenly paying attention to class mattered; suddenly there was a pedagogical niche unfulfilled by the heaps of mock exam papers that unknowingly equalled 18th-century verbiage with contemporary slangs. Combined with his supersession of the strict teacher-student distance, his refreshing material became canonically avant garde–the proverbial “cool kid” would wear his stamp of approval.

One afternoon he asked us to discuss in groups of four our thoughts on a seminal text I no longer could recall. He would stroll around class eavesdropping on conversations, exaggerating his facial expression as a mute response to the substance of our conversations. This was no anomaly in the way he hosted his class aimed at the “speaking” portion of the exam. When stopping by my group, he asked me to elaborate on the point I just tried to communicate to the group. All of us could tell that his excessive nodding did not necessarily imply approval or derision of the content, but all of the sudden he said, very unseriously:

“I would rather kiss a dead person than hear you speak.”

There was probably a lot more content to the melodramatic remarks that ensued, but all I remembered was how my eyes, and all of my friends’, widened as we checked upon each other’s reactions. Mind you, before this moment most people had tolerated the way I spoke–with my habit of mumble-repeating exactly what I just said as a self-reminder if I said something wrong, with debate-kid speed that caused me to stutter, or with incomplete enunciation of trailing consonants I tried to cover with an otherwise native-like cadence. (This might sound delusional, but a lot of professors in college have dipped their toes in the “you sound so American” quicksand with me). To be told so frankly, in front of my entire class no less, that some component of the way I orated was mind-numbing, was something I later learned could be considered traumatizing.

Between the second semester of my tenth grade and my first time taking the National English Competition, I spent hours standing in front of a mirror analyzing every pattern of speech I had. I became much more conscious of how I sounded, recording my voice, observed my tongue positioning in different languages, and taking deep breaths before I started speaking. An idea that I experimented with was the process of ideation and transcription. How did the phenomenological bridge between what I wanted to say and what I said occured, and was there a way to tune it? I documented how long it took me to actually write a sentence to my liking, since I would delete and reorder and paraphrase and specify even before I finish writing my original thought. It was lucky that my approach to learning runs on the momentum of vengeance: if something seemingly feasible to comprehend does not translate to the results I obtain, then I easily become addicted to cracking it. But trying to perform speech therapy on myself to speak felt akin to coping with a problem whose root causes were genetic and solutions cosmetic. I caved in to the idea that a natural part of me being fundamentally broken so that I could pay lip-service to an authority figure, even if the advice might have been perfectly sound.

When it was time to apply to colleges, I had forgotten to take the required proof of proficiency. I had settled on applying first to a college that did not include such tests in its requirements, so it was only after I had submitted my Early Action application that I realized I was in a time crunch. An English center was offering promotions at the time that allowed its students to get cash back based on their testing performance (think $850 for a 8.5 IELTS results), so I asked for a mock test: killing two birds with one stone. My TOEFL results came out to barely higher than a 100, so they offered expensive one-on-one tutoring if I wanted to take the test in three weeks. They were trying to swindle me back, and I did not bother asking my parents for such money. College applications had already cost a lot.

One week before my early application result was released, an email arrived stating that I had achieved a perfect score on the TOEFL. To my knowledge a 9.0 IELTS had been accomplished by several people (one of the same age in the same year), but I was the first high school student in Vietnam to earn a 120. My immediate reaction was disbelief, followed by the glimmering hope that my EA college would look upon me more favorably with such a result (the school was known in my country to only admit people it interviewed, and no one in my year as far as I knew was interviewed). Of course it did not happen, so all that score served was a check box on my Regular Decisions schools’ to-submit lists.

I did not really process what that accomplishment meant for me until I had to write the open-prompt supplementary essay for the college that I later actually studied in. Write something you felt was important to you that did not have space to be conveyed elsewhere in your application, or something adjacent was all the rage among edgy colleges. I tried to afford the most authenticity I could muster in nearly sixty essays I finished earlier, so it was hard to localize something I had not seized the opportunity to speak about. A common theme was about youth empowerment, making my voice heard through national platforms, and an investigative mentality towards social phenomena; I had talked at lengths about my outward-facing observations, whose common denominators morphed my initial interest in Model UN into broader youth engagement ideas. But was there no internal struggle I had to deal with? I was running out of memories to unearth.

Looking back now, I realized my growth with my pronunciation continued in college. “To me, biting my tongue is scarier in the literal sense[; words] like “thousandth” and “anthropomorphic” are mental marathons,” my corny narrations depicted, “I’d long given up dreams of whistling, but even worse were the extra consonants involuntarily punctuating every sentence [that forced me to] stop mid-sentence, replenish my air supply, and focus on navigating a single syllable.” Dipthongs and rhotic alveolars ceased being inimical to my daily externalization, and some of the anxiety that embedded my philosophy of speech one day disappeared. I gained a sense of ownership of my English usage, controlling its flexions and irregularities as if I was born into it. Perhaps now I deserve the high score I achieved on the TOEFL, but the good news is my thoughts are no less speedy. There is a certain degree of maturity that allowed me to mince my words, round out my phonemes, and deliberate my diction, to a point where I refine the form as much as the content of my thoughts. There is a mechanical element of proficiency tests that good test-takers could easily notice and ace. For me, it took an immersive self-conditioning to convince myself that I was capable of speaking sense.

That is, before I started habitually spewing tangential gibberish to my close college friends.