A Road to Success in Language Olympiads: A Comprehensive Analysis of EFL Olympiad Tasks in Russia from Inception to 2023

Professional Discourse & Communication. 2024. Vol. 6. No. 3. P. 97–115.

Rodomanchenko A., Sorokina E.

Language Olympiads have been effectively used by Russian universities for enrollment purposes for years. As a result, secondary and high school students have been coached to take those to improve their chances of university matriculation. The purpose of the research was to trace the development of the tasks used in EFL Olympiads over a decade to identify the most common ones in order to provide a school English language teacher with a clear framework that might facilitate their task of preparing students for language Olympiads. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the past papers of the Olympiads in question from 2015 to 2023. The in-depth analysis of the types of tasks in top language olympiads allowed us to identify the most common features the tasks display and the current precedence of receptive skills, integrated and cultural knowledge checking questions over productive and creative skills. While tasks aimed at assessing productive skills are shunned in the elimination round, they give more than 50% of the total score in the final rounds of the Olympiads. And the tasks checking the speaking skills of the secondary and high school students have only negligible presence in the range of the Olympiad tasks. There is also a clearly visible trend of checking participants’ knowledge of the history, literature, and culture of English-speaking countries both directly and indirectly while testing both receptive and productive skills. Moreover, the tasks aimed at assessing integrated skills, which used to be the least common, are now gaining ground. The results of the research made it obvious that the focus of preparation should be shifted to skills development rather than individual tasks to facilitate the process of simultaneous preparation for multiple EFL Olympiads and to enhance students’ performance in the short term. 

Keywords: skill acquisition, академические умения и навыки, методика преподавания английского языка, alternative assessment, Подготовка к экзаменам, Language Olympiads, Bloom's taxonomy, exam preparation, task formats, EFL teaching, альтернативный контроль, языковые олимпиады, таксономия Блума, форматы заданий