Post on 15-Feb-2016
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OVERVIEW OF ASSESSMENT: CONTEXT, ISSUES & TRENDS
TSL3112 LANGUAGE ASSESSMENTPISMP TESL SEMESTER 6
IPGKDRI
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Assessment:– “appraising or estimating the level or magnitude
of some attribute of a person” (Mousavi, 2009).– An ongoing process that encompasses a wide
range of methodological techniques – e.g. students’ responses, comments or trying out new words / structures.
– A good teacher never ceases to assess students – incidental or intended.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Test:– A method of measuring a person’s ability,
knowledge, or performance in a given domain.– A subset of assessment, a genre of assessment
techniques.– A prepared administrative procedure which occurs
at identifiable times in a curriculum when learners muster all their faculties to offer peak performance, knowing that their responses are being measured and evaluated.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Test:– A method: an instrument – a set of techniques,
procedures, or items – that requires performance on the par of the test-taker.
– Measure: a process of quantifying a test-taker’s performance according to explicit procedures or rules (Bachman, 1990).
– The measurement of individual’s ability, knowledge, or performance / competence.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Test:– The measurement of a given domain.
– Thus, a well-constructed test is an instrument that provides an accurate measure of the test-taker’s ability within a particular domain.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Measurement:– The process of quantifying the observed
performance of classroom learners.– The issue of QUANTITATIVE & QUALITATIVE
descriptions of student performance.– Quantitative – assigning numbers, i.e. rankings
and letter grades.– Qualitative – written descriptions, oral feedback,
and other nonquantifiable reports.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
• Evaluation:– The interpretation of information.– Does not necessarily entail testing; rather,
evaluation is involved when the results of a test (or other assessment procedure) are used for decision making (Bachman, 1990).
– I.O.W. – you evaluate when you value the results.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
EvaluationTests
Measurement
Assessment
Teaching
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Language-testing trends and practices have followed the shifting sands of teaching methodology.
• For examples:– 1940s & 1950s – an era of behaviourism and special
attention to contrastive analysis, language tests focused on specific linguistic elements.
– 1970s & 1980s – communicative theories of language brought with them a more integrative view of testing.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Behavioural Influences on Language Testing:– Through the middle of the 20th century, language
teaching and testing – strongly influenced by behavioural psychology and structural linguistics.
– Emphasis on sentence-level grammatical paradigms, definitions of vocabulary items, and translation.
– Test consisted of grammar and vocabulary items in MCQ with a variety of translation exercises – words, sentences, and short paragraphs.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Behavioural Influences on Language Testing:– Discrete-point formats – the assumption that
language can be broken down into its component parts.
– The psychometric-structuralist approach – test designers seized the tools of the day to focus on issues of validity, reliability, and objectivity.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Integrative Approaches:– In the midst of this fervor, language pedagogy was
rapidly moving in more communicative directions.– The profession emerged into an era emphasizing
communication, authenticity, and context – new approaches were sought.
– John Oller (1979) argued that language competence was a unified set of interacting abilities that could not be tested separately.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Integrative Approaches:– The introduction of integrative testing.– Two types: cloze tests and dictations.– Proponents of integrative test methods centred their
arguments on what became known as the unitary trait hypothesis – an invisible view of language proficiency: that vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and the four language skills and other discrete points of language could not be disentangled from each other in language performance.
– However, it was eventually abandoned.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Communicative Language Testing:– The mid-1980s – Canale and Swain’s (1980)
seminal work on communicative competence resulted the language-testing field had begun to focus on designing communicative language-testing tasks.
– Bachman and Palmer (1996) included among fundamental principles of language testing the need for a correspondence between language test performance and language use.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Communicative Language Testing:– The problem faced – tasks tended to be artificial,
contrived, and unlikely to mirror language use in real life.
– The quest for authenticity – centred on communicative performance.
– Following Canale and Swain’s (1980) model – Bachman (1990) proposed a model of language competence:
Language Competence
Organisational Competence
Grammatical
Competence
- Vocabul
ary-
Morphology
-Syntax-
Phonology /
Graphology
Textual Compete
nce-
Cohesion-
Rhetorical
Organisation
Pragmatic Competence
Illocutionary
Competence
- Ideation
al Functio
ns-
Manipulative
Functions-
Heuristic
Functions-
Imaginative
Functions
Sociolinguistic
Competence
- Sensitivit
y to Dialect / Variety
- Sensitivit
y to Register
- Sensitivit
y to Naturaln
ess- Cultural Referenc
es and Figures
of Speech
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Communicative Language Testing:– Bachman and Palmer (1996) also emphasised on the
importance of strategic competence, i.e. the ability to employ communicative strategies to compensate for breakdowns & enhance rhetorical effect of utterances, in the process of communication.
– Challenges: to identify the kinds of real-world tasks that language learners to perform, the contexts were too widely varied, & the sampling of tasks for assessment procedure needed to be validated.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Communicative Language Testing:– Weir (1990) – to measure language proficiency:
where, when, how, with whom, and why language is to be used, and on what topics, and with what effect.
– The assessment field became more concerned with the authenticity of tasks and the genuineness of texts.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Performance-Based Assessment:– The new and more student-centred agenda.– Involve oral production, written production, open-
ended responses, integrated performance (across skill areas), group performance, and other interactive tasks.
– Time-consuming & relatively expensive; however, result in more direct and more accurate testing – students are assessed as they perform actual and stimulated real-world tasks.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Performance-Based Assessment:– Higher content validity – learners are measured in
the process of performing the targeted linguistic acts.
– In an English language teaching context – teachers may face a difficult time to distinguish between formal and informal assessment.
– The goals of performance-based assessment will be met if relying a little less on formally structured tests and a little more on evaluation.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Performance-Based Assessment:– A characteristic of many performance-based
language assessments is the presence of interactive tasks (a.k.a. task-based assessment).
– The assessments involve learners in actually performing the behaviour to measure.
– Test-takers are measured in the act of speaking, requesting, responding, or in combining listening and speaking, and in integrating reading and writing.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
• Performance-Based Assessment:– A prime example – oral interview: the authenticity
of real-life language use.
CHANGING TRENDS IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT – MALAYSIAN CONTEXT
• Tutorial questions:– Compare and contrast informal and formal
assessments.– Compare and contrast the implementation of
assessments between the KBSR and KSSR.