Exploring Language Assessment and Testing

Language in Action

Anthony Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415597241, 9780415597234
• eBook ISBN: 9781134516629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics is a series of introductory level textbooks covering the core topics in Applied Linguistics, primarily designed for those beginning postgraduate studies, or taking an introductory MA course as well as advanced undergraduates. Titles in the series are also ideal for language professionals returning to academic study.

The books take an innovative 'practice to theory' approach, with a 'back-to-front' structure. This leads the reader from real-world problems and issues, through a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns, before finally relating these practical issues to theoretical foundations. Additional features include tasks with commentaries, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated further reading section.

Exploring Language Assessment and Testing is a straightforward introduction to the field that provides an inclusive and impartial survey of both classroom based assessment by teachers and larger scale testing, using concrete examples to guide students to the relevant literature.

Ranging from theory to classroom based scenarios, the author provides practical guidance on designing, developing and using assessments, with flexible, step by step processes for improving the quality of tests and assessment systems to make them fairer and more accurate.

This book is an indispensable introduction to the areas of language assessment and testing, and will be of interest to language teachers as well as postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students studying Language Education, Applied Linguistics and Language Assessment.

Part I

Part I of this book is intended as a practical resource to help teachers, students, trainees and anyone interested in language education to understand more about the practice of language assessment and testing. A better understanding of the qualities of good assessments and of processes and techniques for improving this should help practising teachers and other educators to make more effective use of assessment in their professional lives.

The first two chapters set out the core functions of language assessments. Chapter 1 outlines what is meant by language assessment and its place in language education. Chapter 2 considers some of the many reasons that people have for assessing language abilities. It shows how the practice of language assessment needs to be closely linked to the ways in which results will be used and interpreted. In educational settings, this means there must be an interdependent relationship between teaching, learning and assessment.

Chapter 3 explains a practical and widely applicable approach to building quality assessments for use in the classroom or in testing programmes. Chapter 4 describes the qualities of useful assessments and ways of evaluating them. These chapters introduce the reader to ways of working that have been shown to improve the quality of assessment materials and procedures.

Part II introduces the reader to relevant theoretical insights and shows how the processes described in Part I are used in developing tests and assessments. Chapters 5 and 6 offer straightforward guidance on designing and developing more effective assessments and preparing appropriate materials for the purpose. Supplementary resources on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/rial) illustrate the wide range of options open to writers of assessments for learners of all ages and at all stages of language learning.

Part III introduces the reader to the study of language assessment, tracing its emergence as a distinct field of enquiry. It outlines developing trends and points to areas of controversy and debate. This aspect of the book not only helps to contextualise and deepen understanding of the practices described, but opens up avenues for the reader to explore through further study.

The focus throughout is on assessing people’s ability to use foreign, second or additional languages and reasons for studying this. The principles and techniques described apply to the assessment of any language, but the examples are mainly taken from the assessment of English. This is partly because my own experience is mainly in teaching and assessing English, but also for the very good reason that this book is itself written in English and so the examples should be accessible to all readers.

Technical terms that are covered in the Glossary are identified where they first appear by bold type. Additional resources and practical exercises are provided on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/rial). For each section, further sources of reading are recommended for the reader who wishes to explore the issues in more depth.

1	Putting language assessment in its place

Personal reflection

What do you understand by the term language assessment? How is it different from language teaching or language learning?

What do you think are the main differences (if any) between assessments, tests and examinations?

What do you understand by the terms language skills, language knowledge and language abilities?

Think about an experience you have had of a language test.

Did you find the experience enjoyable? Why (or why not)?

Do you think that the test helped you to learn the language? How?

Language as evidence about people

It is a natural reaction to hearing or reading any fragment of language to use it as evidence about the person who produced it. When we speak on the telephone to people whom we have not met, we may use the sound of their voice, its accent and pitch to give us clues about whether they are native speakers of our language, which region they come from, their gender, age, social class and profession, and their mood and attitudes.

It seems that we can’t help forming an opinion about people according to the kind of language they produce. In Britain, surveys of customers of telephone call centres investigating attitudes towards accents show that British people tend to associate American accents with high levels of success, Scottish accents with trustworthiness, and the accents of people who come from large cities such as London, Liverpool and Birmingham with low levels of both (The Yorkshire Post, 2006). These attitudes may be unreasonable, but we are more likely to listen to and believe messages delivered by voices that we find pleasing and trustworthy. Businesses know this and carefully choose actors with suitable accents to deliver their advertising messages.

If we receive a letter or email from someone, we base similar judgements on their choice of words and written style. We may even begin to form ideas about their appearance and personality. As you read this, you are probably already building up a picture in your mind of the writer of this book. When you do this kind of thing, you are using the language that a person produces to make inferences or draw conclusions about them.

Linguistic evidence can sometimes be used quite formally to give insights into a person’s identity or personality. Experts in forensic linguistics often try to establish where a suspect comes from by studying his or her accent or speech patterns. Sometimes employers look at the size and shape of job applicants’ handwriting because this is supposed to give insights into their personalities. However, these kinds of inferences about people’s regional origins or characteristics are not usually what is implied by the term language assessment. In this book the focus is on assessments where knowledge about language, the ability to use language or skill in applying these are measured or evaluated.

In everyday life, we not only make judgements about people on the basis of how they use language; we also make judgements about the qualities of the language that they use. We notice when they make grammatical errors or choose an inappropriate word; when they appear impolite or overly formal; when they are very hesitant; when they are being unclear or imprecise or, on the other hand, when they seem to express their ideas particularly well. We also judge our own use of language. As we speak or write, we monitor and correct ourselves. We put right our slips of the tongue and fix our spelling mistakes (with or without the help of our word processing software); we rephrase the things we say if people misunderstand us; we reorganise our written texts to try to make our ideas clearer to our readers.

The nature of the knowledge, skills and abilities involved in learning and using a language is a matter of debate. An introduction to some of the contentious issues that have excited language assessment specialists is given in Part III. Briefly, knowledge about language may include recognising a word written in a foreign language and knowing a translation equivalent (bird in English can be translated as

in Arabic,

in Chinese or Vogel in German), or knowing a grammatical rule: the past participle in English regular verbs is formed by adding – ed to the stem: look – looked), or knowing pragmatic conventions. For example, in most circumstances How are you? spoken by an acquaintance is likely to be intended as a conventional greeting. The anticipated response might be, Good. You? rather than details of the other’s feelings or of any medical conditions.

A distinction is often made in language education following Hymes (1972) between knowledge of the rules governing language as a system and the ability to actually use language in unrehearsed interaction. Learners may know a good deal about a language, but be unable to access the words or phrases they know in the course of a conversation or be unable to pronounce them accurately. Conversely, many people are able to communicate effectively in a wide range of situations with little or no explicit knowledge of the systems of rules that govern the language they are using. Language skills involve drawing on language knowledge and language abilities in order to read, listen, write, speak, to interact with others, or to mediate between them.

The evidence we have of a person using a language may be very limited – a few telephone conversations and a handful of emails, perhaps – but based on what we observe in these few instances, we often make inferences about their more general knowledge of a language, their ability to use the language and their skill in carrying out language-related tasks. We may hear them speak for just a few minutes, but reach conclusions such as: ‘Adel knows more Albanian than I do’ or ‘Bonita can get by in Bengali’. We see a few examples of their writing and we make statements such as: ‘Carole can write very polished business letters in Chinese’ or ‘Dai finds it really difficult to form questions in Danish’.

The major focus of this book will be on the use of language assessment in educational contexts. This setting for language assessment is unusual in some important ways. Firstly, language teachers, unlike most of us, are actually expected to voice their judgements about other people’s language use and are generally rewarded (rather than resented) for pointing out and correcting errors. If you have worked as a language teacher, you will probably have experience during the natural course of any lesson of deciding whether one of your students has produced accurate and appropriate language, and perhaps putting right mistakes they have made or asking them to try again. You have probably asked them to read or listen to a text in the foreign language and then asked them questions about it to check their understanding. As I define language assessment in this book, examples can range from informal classroom activities to well-known national and international language tests.

So, here is a simple definition:

Language assessment involves obtaining evidence to inform inferences about a person’s language-related knowledge, skills or abilities.

The evidence comes from the performance of tasks that involve the use of language. The inferences are what we interpret the performance to mean based on our beliefs about the nature of language and its role in the life of the person being assessed.

The inferences we make about assessees (the term I will use in this book for the people being assessed) are generally used to inform decisions – decisions that can range in magnitude from whether it would be better for them to use another comma in a sentence or practice saying a certain phrase again, to whether they should be given a job or permitted to make their home in a certain country.

In language education, teacher training programmes tend to give assessment rather little attention. Assessment is often the topic of just a few sessions: apparently an issue of little direct concern to the teacher, perhaps better left to expert specialists. On the other hand, it sometimes seems to take on overriding importance in the lives of teachers and learners. Many school children, if asked why they are learning a foreign language, would answer that they are doing it mainly to pass a public test, often known as an examination. Most language teachers spend a good deal of time assessing their students and, especially when the day of an important national examination is getting close, many dedicate most of their classes to preparing their students to take these tests.

In this book I argue that language assessment is inseparable from the teaching and learning of languages. This challenges the more traditional view in teacher education that assessment is a distinct activity: one that is marginal to the main business of the language teacher. In my view, teachers need to develop what is sometimes called assessment literacy. They not only need to understand something about how language assessments are made, scored and interpreted by others, but also to be able to make, score and interpret the results of useful assessments themselves. Experience suggests that low levels of assessment literacy can lead to bad educational decisions and to teaching and learning that are less effective than they could be.

Assessment and testing

The traditional view that separates assessment from teaching may result from the identification of the word assessment with the narrower activity of testing. A test is an event that is especially set up to elicit a performance (usually within a predetermined time frame) for the purpose of making judgements about a person’s knowledge, skills or abilities. In the course of a language test the person being judged (the assessee – a ‘test taker’, ‘testee’ or ‘candidate’) will respond to a prompt (e.g., an essay title; questions asked by an interviewer; a set of choices on a test paper). The test taker’s response is judged or scored according to a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• References
• Index