Exploring Language Assessment and Testing

Language in Action

Anthony Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000332193
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics series takes 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.

Exploring Language Assessment and Testing offers a straightforward and accessible introduction that starts from real-world experiences and uses practical examples to introduce the reader to the academic field of language assessment and testing.

Extensively updated, with additional features such as reader tasks (with extensive commentaries from the author), a glossary of key terms and an annotated further reading section, this second edition provides coverage of recent theoretical and technological developments and explores specific purposes for assessment. Including concrete models and examples to guide readers into the relevant literature, this book also offers practical guidance for educators and researchers on designing, developing and using assessments.

Providing an inclusive and impartial survey of both classroom-based assessment by teachers and larger-scale testing, this is an indispensable introduction for 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 helps 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.

Supplementary resources are available on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/rial). There you can find three additional documents that extend what is available in this book: Illustrative Assessment Cycles and Statistical Tools accompany Chapter 3, giving examples of assessment cycles and introducing statistical procedures that can help in improving the quality of assessments.

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.

On the companion website, the document Task Types accompanies Chapters 5 and 6. It sets out a wide range of options for people involved in preparing assessment tasks.

Part III introduces the reader to the study of language assessment, tracing its emergence as a distinct field of inquiry. 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, it also opens up avenues for the reader to explore through further study.

The focus throughout is on assessing peoples’ 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 on the internet can be found via the Links button on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/rial). For each section, sources are recommended for the reader who wishes to explore the issues further.

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? In what ways did it help?

Language as evidence about people

It is a natural reaction to hearing or reading any fragment of language to treat it as evidence about the person who produced it. When we speak on the telephone to people 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 country or 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. Americans tend to connect British accents with intelligence while British people associate American accents with wealth and high levels of success. Stereotypes like these may be unreasonable, but we are more likely to listen to and believe messages delivered by voices that we find pleasing and dependable. Businesses know this and carefully choose actors with suitable accents to deliver their advertising messages. Language learners tend to adopt similar opinions, preferring the prestige of standard accents found in textbooks.

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. Note that when a word appears in this book in bold type (as inferences does here), you will find a brief definition in the Glossary in Chapter 8.

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 personal 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 or communicate 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.

What does it mean to use a language?

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 recognizing a word written in a foreign language and knowing a translation equivalent (bird in English can be translated as طائر in Arabic, 鸟 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 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 can 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.’

This book will focus on the relationship between how a person performs on an assessment, the inferences that users of the assessment make about them and the impact that the process has on the people involved. The emphasis 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 agai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Glossary
• Further reading
• References
• Index