Language testing and assessment

1. Language testing and assessment Kalbos gebėjimų tikrinimas ir vertinimas Spring term 2011

2. Course outline • Assessment • Testing • What is a good test? • validity • reliability • feasibility/practicality • washback effect

3. Course outline • Test development: • test specification • test developers • item writing, item banks etc. • trialling and validation • administration

4. Course outline • Tests of different language skills: • listening and reading • speaking and writing • grammar? vocabulary? OR use of language? • Development of test items

5. Evaluation Assessment Testing It is a broad term and it does not necessarily deal with language proficiency. It deals with the proficiency of the language user. It is a form of assessment. A few basic terms

6. A few basic terms • Evaluation - vertinimas • Assessment – vertinimas • Testing – tikrinimas, testavimas

7. A few basic terms • Competences and subcompetences • Skills and subskills • Performance (Lith. atliktis) • Knowledge

8. Traditional assessment • Traditional assessment cast the teacher as the assessor who set summative examinations, marked them in private and wrote a report about the student's success or failure in private, to be delivered to the student's parents or guardian. The student was largely kept out of the assessment. (Cohen et al. 1996: 424-5).

9. Traditional assessment: some critique • Individual marks for formal exercises undertaken summatively (end-of-unit tests or homeworks) is unhelpful. Such feedback is already delayed as research suggests that learners benefit most from rapid feedback. Timing is crucial. The longer the time lag between performance and feedback, the less efficacious the feedback is likely to be in correcting errors and enhancing future performance. Though summative ass certainly has its own place in a teacher's repertoire.

10. Types of assessment

11. Types of assessment • Week’s/term’s work – achievement a. • Assessment of ability to apply the knowledge in the real world – proficiency • Students in rank order – norm-referencing • Ability irrespective of peers – criterion-referencing

12. Types of assessment • Multiple choice – objective • Judgement by an assessor – subjective • Throughout a course – continuous • What happened earlier is irrelevant; what a person does now is decisive – fixed points

13. Types of assessment • Ongoing process feeding the course planning – formative • Attainment at the end of the course with a grade – summative • A learner provides a sample of language in speech or writing – performance • A learner answers questions about sth. - knowledge

14. Types of assessment • Global synthetic judgement done intuitively - holistic a. • Considering different aspects – analytic a. • Judgements by the teacher or examiner • Judgements about your own proficiency

15. Types of assessments in AFK • Achievement and proficiency • Criterion-referencing • Continuous and fixed assessment points • Knowledge rather than performance • Subjective rather than objective • Analytic rather than holistic • Assessment by other rather than self-assessment