overview of assessment: context, issues & trends tsl3112 language assessment pismp tesl semester...

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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.

overview of assessment: context, issues & trends tsl3112 language assessment pismp tesl semester...

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