Part III: Understanding Theory and Issues in the Field Reflection on Learning in the MA TESOL program: Option B, Theory

to Practice

In AL 6730: Assessment in TESOL, during the Fall 2012 semester, we were given our first opportunity to apply theory to practice in assessment. Part of the course was a group project in which, together with three other students, I developed and administered an assessment instrument to an actual ELL class. The paper that I am submitting as a theory-to-practice piece is a detailed account of that project, as well as a literature review of a particular area of language assessment. Because our assessment instrument, a mid-term achievement test, had been entirely on vocabulary recognition, I chose to compare and contrast the potential alternative assessment techniques we could have employed as opposed to the traditional multiple choice technique that we actually implemented. I explored these different techniques by showing how the same testing objectives could be achieved by using alternative assessment rather than the original multiple choice technique in several sections of our test. A definite strength of this project was our understanding that if we did not have the specifications (our first task) done correctly, we were not going to produce a test that meet the five criterion for a good test, as recognized by Hughes (2002): validity, reliability, practicality, authenticity, and positive wash back .We particularly wanted to incur positive wash back for the students. We therefore forced ourselves to focus on what our test was testing, what distractors should be discarded and replaced, and what we inevitably wanted the students to gain from it.

There were many aspects of theory that had not solidified in my mind before being forced to apply it through the research completed for this course and paper. For example, when we were tasked with creating test specifications, we found that the editing process was cylindrical. When we revised an objective, we would then need to modify the test structure, which would cause an imbalance in techniques, and so on and so forth. It took quite some time for our group to develop a test that would produce meaningful student outcomes. From this project, I learned that applying theory into practice is not a onetime process. The results we obtained from our test analysis was extremely insightful and opened our minds to new ways to improve that specific test. If this test had been for a class I were in charge of, I would then revise the test and re-administer it, after which the analysis and improvement would begin anew.

References Hughes, A. (2002).Testing for language teachers (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press.