Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marcia Tadjuddin
Which side are you on?
Pro or Con?
Develop your arguments!
Testing Grammar
Why Test Grammar?
Gap filling:
They left at 7. They _________ be home by now.
Multiple Choice:
A: They left at 7. They _________ be home by now.
B: Yes, but we cant count on it, cant we?
a) was working
b) has been working
c) is working
d) had worked
Scoring Production Grammar Tests
The important thing when scoring is to be clear
about what each item is testing, and to award points
for that only.
Nothing should be deducted for non-grammatical
errors, or for errors in elements of grammar which
are not being tested by the item.
If two elements are being tested in an item, then
points may be assigned to each of them.
Alternatively, it can be predetermined that both
elements have to be correct for any points to be
awarded.
To ensure scoring is valid and reliable, careful
preparation of the scoring key is necessary.
Testing Vocabulary
Why test vocabulary?
If there is little teaching of vocabulary, it may be
argued that there is little call for achievement tests
of vocabulary.
For those who believe that systematic teaching of
vocabulary is desirable, vocabulary achievement
tests are appreciated for their backwash effect.
The usefulness and feasibility of a general diagnostic
test of vocabulary is not readily apparent.
In placement tests, we would be looking for some
general indication of the adequacy of the students
vocabulary. We would not normally require a
particular set of lexical items to be a prerequisite for
a particular language class.
Writing Specification
If vocabulary is being consciously taught, then
presumably all the items presented to the students
should be included in the specifications.
We can add all the new items that the students have
met in other activities (reading, listening, etc.)
Words should be grouped according to whether their
recognition of their production is required.
A subsequent step is to group the items in terms of
their relative importance.
For placement tests or proficiency tests ,
specification refer to one of the published word lists
that indicate the frequency of the words.
Sampling
Words can be grouped according to their
frequency and usefulness.
From each of these groups, items can be taken at
random, with more being selected from the
groups containing the more frequent and useful
words.
Writing Items:
Testing recognition ability