William Shakespeare: The Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2017

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

John Keats

S. T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 2015

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice 2004

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, David Copperfield

Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 2008

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter 2010

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

Emily Dickinson

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2005

Herman Melville: Moby Dick

Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim 2011

James Joyce: Ulysses

G. B. Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 2007

F. S. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby 2016

Ernest Hemingway: Short Stories

Eugene O’Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra

William Faulkner: Absalom! Absalom!

T.S. Eliot: Waste Land

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

John Keats

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, David Copperfield

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

Emily Dickinson

Herman Melville: Moby Dick

Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

James Joyce: Ulysses

G. B. Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion

Ernest Hemingway: Short Stories

Eugene O’Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra

William Faulkner: Absalom! Absalom!

T.S. Eliot: Waste Land

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

An ELT Glossary : Discrete Item and Integrative Tests, Direct

and Indirect Testing
Discrete item (or discrete point) tests are tests which test one element of language at a time. For
example, the following multiple choice item tests only the learner's knowledge of the correct past form
of the verb sing :

14. When I was a child I .......... in a choir.

a. sing b. singed c. song d. sung e. sang

They have the advantages of often being practical to administer and mark, and objective in terms of
marking. However, they show only the learners ability to recognise or produce individual items - not
how s/he would use the language in actual communication. In other words, they are
inevitably indirect tests - they provide evidence of the learners' ability to recognise or produce
certain specific elements of the language, but do not demonstrate how they might actually use them
(or anything else) in communication. Learners’ abilities are inferred rather than demonstrated.
Integrative tests, on the other hand, may be either direct or indirect. The use of the
term integrative indicates that they test more than one skill and/or item of knowledge at a time.
Dictation is an integrative test, because it involves listening skills, writing skills, knowledge of specific
language items eg in order to distinguish whether /əv/ should be written as have or of and so on.
Dictation is still, however, an indirect test,

Many integrative tests, on the other hand, are often also direct tests - they ask the learner to
demonstrate their ability to perform a specific "real life" communicative task by asking them to
actually do it. They therefore demonstrate the learners's ability to use the language in actual
communication.
) “Whereas
discrete items attempt to test knowledge of language one bit at a time, integrativetests attempt to assess a learner's capacity to
use many bits all at the same time, and possibly while exercisingseveral presumed components of a grammatical system, and
perhaps more than one of the traditional skills oraspects of skills.

”
An example of a direct test which is also integrative might be role-playing a job interview, where the
learners have to listen and understand the examiner's questions, choose the relevant grammar and lexis
to express their ideas, speak with intelligible/accurate pronunciation and intonation etc. Other direct
tests might include eg writing a letter of complaint; or reading and completing an application form.

These direct tests all demand that the learner integrates a variety of skills and items of linguistic
knowledge to complete the test, and show how effectively the learner can use the language in
communication. They have the disadvantage however, that they do not necessarily evidence knowledge
of specific items - for instance, a learner might fail to produce a difficult structure by expressing the
same concept in a different manner - eg I didn't know so I didn't go rather than If I had known I would
have gone. With a direct test it is impossible to know whether the learners "avoided" the difficult
structure because they had never met it or knew they would produce it inaccurately, or whether it was
just by chance that they chose to say one thing rather than another. An indirect, discrete item test
can, on the other hand, "push" the learner into demonstrating their knowledge (or lack of it) of chosen
structure, lexis etc.

For this reason, many test batteries use a mixture of indirect tests and direct tests - each can balance
the deficiencies of the other.