Methods of Assessment
- 10. What are discrete-point tests? What are tests of integrative skills? Discuss their relative advantages and disadvantages. Is the distinction valid? - - 11. What factors influencing language learning should be tested? How?
- - 12. How has language testing been influenced by varying contemporary views on language and language learning?
- Cognitive styles (real child-adult differences)
- Aptitude, Metalinguistic Ability & the Monitor (Grammatical sensitivity & inductive ability)
- Integrative & Instrumental motivation and social group identification, emotional states, personality, cultural
- Language Testing Handbook by Harrison (1987) - a clear and concise introduction to theory and practice.
- Language Testing by J.B. Heaton (MEP 1982) - a comprehensive round up of all the important concepts.
- Writing English Language Tests by J.B. Heaton (Longman 1975 New Ed. 1988) - practical: good to read before getting down to it yourself
- The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics Volume 4 - Testing & Experimental Design - by Allen (Oxford 1977) - for university research.
- English Speaking Union Framework by Brendan Carrol & Richard West (1989) - good for specifying skills & objectives and defining standards & levels.
- Language Testing by Baker (1989) - covers the theory and is fairly readable.
- Marking & Assessment in English - Pauline Chater (1984) [UK Secondary School context; covers assessments of open writing as opposed to closed assignments]
- Teaching & Testing English by P.B. Ballard and Philip Boswood (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd 1939) - nothing's new!
- 10. What are discrete-point tests? What are tests of integrative skills? Discuss their relative advantages and disadvantages. Is the distinction valid?
Spolsky (1975) identifies three stages in the recent history of language testing: 1) The pre-scientific 2) the psychometric-structuralist and 3) the psycho-linguistic-sociolinguistic.
Psychometric-Structuralist Testing (Lado's Approach): breaking down the complexities of language into isolated segments. This influences both what is tested and how it is tested.
"What" is revealed by a structural contrastive analysis of L1 and LT at all linguistic levels from syntactic to phonological). How to test = the same approach. Discrete items are constructed.
These ideally reveal the candidate's ability to handle one level of language in terms of one of the 4-skills.
The disadvantage is that they rest on the assumption that proficiency is quantifiable in this way: The assumption that knowledge of the elements of a language is equal to knowledge of that language. A vital element: the ability to synthesize is missing from an atomistic analysis. Also it is extremely difficult (and probably undesirable!) to construct "pure" test items (i.e. items operating on one level of structure ONLY) other than ones which are extremely trivial in nature.
The clear advantage of Discrete Point Tests = they yield data which is easily quantifiable.
The counting of bits - If language performance is to be described by means of numerical scores, discrete-point testing is helpful. The tasks are unambiguous, the marking introduces no element of capriciousness and a person's final score is clear for all to see. Discrete-point tests can be accurately and objectively marked even by mechanical scanning methods.
More disadvantages: correct/incorrect judgements depend on context e.g. certain communities exist where "I be" and "I were" are accepted forms.
Amount of tolerance: incorrect forms may nevertheless be intelligible e.g. I have been in London since 3 days.
De-contextualised sentences are a tenuous basis for judgements about a person's mastery of language.
A further disadvantage arises from Quantity v Quality with reference to TRANSITIONAL COMPETENCE (Corder 1975) and INTERLANGUAGE (Sealinker 1972): re- SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.
Lado's Psychometric Tests view language learning as a process of accretion: correct responses rewarded; incorrect ones punished, but an alternative view is that answers to test questions should be considered as more than simply right or wrong.
c.f. Krashen's stages of acquisition - the morpheme.
RELIABILITY-VALIDITY TENSION: Lado's tests are only objective in terms of actual assessment. In terms of the construction of the test itself and the evaluation of the numerical score yielded, subjective factors pay a big part.
In objective tests, Ss may produce no language at all e.g. MC they only select alternatives. Ability to recognise appropriate forms is deemed sufficient. In subjective testing, the ability to produce the language is crucial.
INTEGRATIVE TESTING - Attempt to assess a learner's capacity to use many bits all at the same time. Integrative tests are often pragmatic in the sense that they set tasks which cause the learner to process sequences of elements in a language that conform to the normal contextual constraints of that language, and which require the learner to relate sequences of linguistic elements via pragmatic mappings to extralinguistic context. Naturalness criteria: Integrative tests: often pragmatic.
Discrete point tests: cannot be pragmatic. There is no ordinary discourse situation and no normal language use context where a learner might be asked to listen and distinguish between "ship" & "sheep" or perform active to passive transformations.
- 11. What factors influencing language learning should be tested? How?
- 12. How has language testing been influenced by varying contemporary views on language and language learning?
Oller advocates the pragmatically oriented approach as opposed to the discrete point oriented language testing approaches.
Keith Morrow and Brendan Carroll pioneered Communicative Language Testing. See Brendan Carroll's case studies in communicative testing.
Note the advent in the late 1970s and 80s of communicative testing in public examinations: The Cambridge Exam in the Communicative Use of English; British Council Course in Testing for Communicative programmes. Changes in The Cambridge Exam Syllabus.