Giáo trình How to Teach English - Chương 2: Approaches to language testing

Nội dung text: Giáo trình How to Teach English - Chương 2: Approaches to language testing

1. Chapter 2 Approaches to language testing Language tests are chronologically classified according to four main approaches: (1) the essay translation approach; (2) the structuralist approach; (3) the integrative approach; and (4) the communicative approach
2. (1) the essay translation approach Characteristics: No special skill or expertise in testing Subjective judgment of teacher Essay writing, translation & grammatical analysis (comments about the language)
3. Disadvantages:  tests a heavy literary and cultural bias  an aural/ oral component at the upper intermediate & advantage levels as something additional & not an integral part of the syllabus or examination
4. (2) the structuralist approach Language learning chiefly concerned with the systematic acquisition of set of habits. Focusing the importance of contrastive analysis & the need to identify & measure learners’ mastery of separated elements of L2:phonology, vocabulary & grammar
5. Listening, speaking, reading & writing are separated from one another & it’s essential to test one skill at a time. The need for statistical measures of reliability & validity - important in testing multiple choice item
6. (3) the integrative approach involving the testing of language in context & concerned with the meaning and the total communicative effect of discourse. assessing the learners’ ability to use two or more skills simultaneously, or a global view of proficiency. involving functional language but not the use of functional language. Forms: cloze test & dictation
7. Cloze testing . Principle: the Gestalt theory of “closure” . Purpose: measuring the reader’s ability to decode ‘interrupted’ or ‘mutilated’ messages by making the most acceptable substitutions from all the contextual clues available
8. . Requirements: to fill in each blank in the text itself . Methods of scoring: one mark acceptable answer; another each exact answer. misspelling not be penalized measuring familiarity with the grammar of the language rather than reading
9. Evidence from research studies performance on cloze tests correlates highly with listening, writing & speaking close testing: a good indicator of general linguistic ability
10. linguistic knowledge, textual knowledge & knowledge of the world cloze tests: achievement, proficiency tests, classroom placement tests & diagnostic tests
11. Dictation Purpose: previously regarded solely as a means of measuring students’ skills of listening comprehension. Auditory discrimination, the auditory memory span, spelling, the recognition of sound segments, a familiarity with grammatical and lexical patterning of the language, and overall textual comprehension
12. good predicators of global language ability, but recent research has found that dictation tends to measure lower-order language skills- straightforward comprehension rather that high-order skills- inference.
13. (4) the communicative approach concerned primarily with how language is used in communication Communicative competence achieved without a considerable mastery of grammar resulting in an attempt to obtain different profiles of a learner’s performance in the language
14. The score obtained on a communicative test several measures of proficiency rather than simply one overall measure. Reflecting the culture of a particular country because of its emphasis on context and the use of authentic materials. Introducing the concept of qualitative modes of assessment in preference to quantitative ones