MANONMANIAM SUNDARANAR UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,

GOVINDAPERI
Department of English
II M.A English
IV Semester - English Language Teaching [PEHM44]

Principal​: ​Dr.K.S.MONY,MSUCollege,Govindaperi​.

Name of faculty​ : L. DEVAKI @ SUBASRI M.A, NET

Unit V : Testing of English Language

Definition 1

"Language Testing is the practice and study of evaluating the proficiency of an

individual in using a particular language effectively."

Priscilla Allen, University of Washington.

(Winning entry from the 2009/10 "definition" competition run on this website)

"The activity of developing and using language tests. As a psychometric activity,

language testing traditionally was more concerned with the production,
development and analysis of tests. Recent critical and ethical approaches to
language testing have placed more emphasis on the uses of language tests. The
purpose of a language test is to determine a person's knowledge and/or ability in
the language and to discriminate that person's ability from that of others. Such
ability may be of different kinds, achievement, proficiency or aptitude. Tests,
unlike scales, consist of specified tasks through which language abilities are
elicited. The term language assessment is used in free variation with language
testing although it is also used somewhat more widely to include for example
classroom testing for learning and institutional examinations."

Alan Davies, University of Edinburgh.

Definition 3

"In the context of language teaching and learning, 'assessment' refers to the act
of collecting information and making judgments about a language learner's
knowledge of a language and ability to use it."

Carol Chapelle and Geoff Brindley, University of iowa State and Macquarie.

Definition 4
"It is a species of sortition infinitely preferable to the ancient method of casting
lots for honours and offices."

F. Y. Edgeworth, in his 1888 paper The Statistics of Examinations.

General types of language tests

Test results are used to make decisions about language reamers, language
teachers and language instructional programs. Generally, five types of language
tests are given to language reamers in order to make decisions: placement tests,
diagnostic tests, achievement tests, proficiency tests and aptitude tests.
Placement tests are administered in order to make decisions about where a
student should be placed within a language instructional program. In most cases,
language reamers with similar language abilities should be grouped together.
The instructor can then work with individuals who are at approximately the same
level of development in language skills and can help them strengthen those
skills.

Diagnostic tests are prepared in order to discover the strengths and

weaknesses of language reamers. This information is useful to language
instructors in helping the trainees make improvement in their language skills.

Achievement tests are administered in order to provide some indication of

whether the instructional goals are being met. Achievement tests are based
directly on the instructional content of the course. As mentioned earlier, the
objectives of the instructional program and the objectives of the testing should be
in harmony with each other, thus leading to beneficial backwash.

Proficiency tests provide an opportunity to test the language skills of the

learners when the testing objectives are tied not to the instructional objectives,
but to abilities in a language regardless of any specific instruction in it.

Aptitude tests seek to provide some indication of an individual's ability to learn a

language. Aptitude tats are used as a screening device to exclude some
Individuals from language study or as an initial placement test, thus allowing a
language program to group learners scoring high or low on the aptitude test in
separate classes. But caution should be used when administering an aptitude
test. Some factors, such as language learning strategies, attitude, motivation and
personality factors, may not be measured in aptitude tests. Because of these
shortcomings, Peace Corps does not use language aptitude tests.

Language Proficiency Tests

Proficiency testing measures a person’s level of skill in a language, independent

of how they learned it. Whether someone grew up speaking Spanish or took
lessons as an adult, a proficiency test should score that person the same.
Because the Parrot language test is built for the workplace, we designed it to
measure proficiency. Our clients want the best skills they can find, no matter how
those skills were obtained.

Aptitude Tests

An aptitude test does not measure how well someone uses a specific language,
but how well they acquire language skills in general. For that reason, you might
use this type of test when selecting candidates for a role that would require them
to learn a new language.

Diagnostic Tests

Proficiency tests usually provide a general assessment of a person’s full

language skillset. In contrast, diagnostic tests identify specific strengths and
weaknesses within that skillset. Use this type of test to identify specific ways to
improve.

Placement & Achievement Tests

These tests are used exclusively in language learning environments. A
placement test measures skill in order to group similarly skilled learners together.
An achievement test measures a learner’s progress over a period of time.

A good language test should have a positive effect on learning and teaching.
Such a test should aim at specifying areas of difficulties experienced by the class
or the individual students so that additional practice and corrective exercises can
be given.

A good language test should also measure students’ performance without setting
“traps” for them. It should be developed well to provide an opportunity for
students to show their ability to perform certain language tasks.

On the other side, the test should enable the teachers to find out which parts of
the language program cause difficulty for the class. In this way, the teachers can
evaluate the effectiveness of the syllabus as well as the methods and materials
they are using.

Although language testing is a fundamental part of learning and teaching in

school today, it is at any level a highly complex process because it must be
based on theory as well as practice.

A written language test is a classic example of formal assessment where

students should be aware of being tested for a reason. There are some various
characteristics that should be taken into account when constructing and using a
language test. These qualities should be addressed with high consideration in
order for a language test to have the positive effect.

This article sheds some light on the top five characteristics of a good language
test. In order to describe it as Good, a language test should be:

1. Reliable:

Reliability is consistency, dependence and trust. This means that the results of a
reliable test should be dependable. They should be consistent (remain stable,
should not be different when the test is used in different days). A test that is
called reliable yield similar results with similar group of students took the same
test under identical conditions.

Thus reliability has three aspects: reliability of the test itself, reliability of the way
in which it has been marked, and reliability of the way in which it has been
administered.

The three aspects of reliability are named: equivalence, stability and internal
consistency (homogeneity).

The first aspect, equivalence, refers to the amount of agreement between two or
more tests that are administered at nearly the same point in time.

Equivalence is measured through administering two parallel forms of the same

test to the same group. This administration of the parallel forms occurs at the
same time or following some time delay.
The second aspect of reliability, stability, is said to occur when similar scores are
obtained with repeated testing with the same group of respondents. In other
words, the scores are consistent from one time to the next. Stability is assessed
through administering the same test to the same individuals under the same
conditions after some period of time.

The third and last aspect of reliability is internal consistency (or homogeneity).
Internal consistency concerns the extent to which items on the test are
measuring the same thing.

There are three factors affect test reliability​:

The length of the test. longer tests produce more reliable results than very brief
quizzes. In general, the more items on a test, the more reliable it is considered to
be.
The administration of the test which include the classroom setting (lighting,
seating arrangements, acoustics, lack of intrusive noise etc.) and how the
teacher manages the test administration.
Affective status of students. Test anxiety can affect students’ test results.

2. Valid:

The term validity refers to whether or not the test measures what it claims to
measure. On a test with high validity the items will be closely linked to the test’s
intended focus. Unless a test is valid it serves no useful function.
One of the most important types of validity for teachers is content validity which
means that the test assesses the course content and the outcomes using formats
familiar to the students.

Content validity is the extent to which the selection of tasks in a test is

representative of the larger set of tasks of which the test is assumed to be a
sample. A test needs to be a representative sample of the teaching contents as
defined and covered in the curriculum.

Like reliability there are also some factors which affect the validity of test scores.

Factors in the test:

Unclear directions to students to respond the test.

Difficulty of the reading vocabulary and sentence structure.
Too easy or too difficult test items.
Ambiguous statements in the test items.
Inappropriate test items for measuring a particular outcome.
Inadequate time provided to take the test.
Length of the test is too short.
Test items not arranged in order of difficulty.
Factors in test administration and scoring:

Unfair aid to individual students, who ask for help,

Cheating by students during testing.
Unreliable scoring of essay type answers.
Insufficient time to complete the test.
Adverse physical and psychological condition at the time of testing.
Factors related to students:

Test anxiety of the students.

Physical and Psychological state of the student

3. Practical:

Practical test is the test that is developed and administered within the available
time and with available resources. Based on this definition, practicality can be
measured by the availability of the resources required to develop and conduct
the test.

Practicality refers to the economy of time, effort and money in testing. Practical
test should be easy to design, easy to administer, easy to mark and easy to
interpret its results.

Traditionally, test practicality has referred to whether we have the resources to

deliver the test that we design.

A test is practical when it:

is not too expensive,

stays with appropriate time constraints,
is relatively easy to administer, and
has a scoring/evaluation procedure that is specific and time efficient.
4. Discriminate:

All assessment is based on comparison, either between one student and

another, or between students as they are now and as they were earlier. An
important feature of a good test is its capacity to discriminate among the
performance of different students or the same student in different points in time.
The extent of the need to Discrimination varies according to the purpose of the
test.

5. Authentic​:

Authenticity means that the language response that students give in the test is
appropriate to the language of communication. The test items should be related
to the usage of the target language.

Other definitions of authenticity are rather similar. The Dictionary of language

testing, for instance, states that “a language test is said to be authentic when it
mirrors as exactly as possible the content and skills under test”. It defines
authenticity as “the degree to which test materials and test conditions succeed in
replicating those in the target situation”.

Authentic tests are an attempt to duplicate as closely as possible the

circumstances of real-life situations. A growing commitment to a
proficiency-based view of language learning and teaching makes authenticity in
language assessment necessary.

In conclusion:
There is criticism toward most classroom language tests showed that they don’t
assess students’ language competence or proficiency because most language
teachers don’t have the ability to construct tests with the features mentioned
above. This lack of ability deserves more attention from both teachers and
supervisors.

A teacher should be trained on designing, developing and conducting the

language tests that include the above characteristics and the feature of being
valuable learning tools.