OVERVIEW OF ASSESSMENT: CONTEXT, ISSUES & TRENDS TSL3123 LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT PPG TESL AMBILAN KHAS FEB 2013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. A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). — |.0.W. — you evaluate when you value the results.Measurement Assessment EvaluationHISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT , INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE ASSESSMENT »* Behavioural Influences on Language Testing: — Through the middle of the 20 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 , INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE 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:skh, Organisational Competence rarnaue Textual Competen Compeun ce Vocabulary = - Cohesion Morphology - Rhetorical -Syntax Organisatio - Phonology " Ui Graphology Language Competence Pragmatic Competence ce ian Sociolinguis tic compaer Competence ce - Ideational - Sensitivity to Functions Dialect / Variety - Manipulative < Sensitivity to Functions Register isti - Sensitivity to Heurene Naturainess Functions + Cultural - Imaginative References and Functions Figures of SpeechHISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT , INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE 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 ,. INLANGUAGE 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 ,. INLANGUAGE 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 , INLANGUAGE ASSESSMENT * Performance-Based Assessment: —Acharacteristic of many performance- based language assessments is the eee of interactive tasks (a.k.a. task- ased 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 , INLANGUAGE ASSESSMENT ¢ Performance-Based Assessment: —A prime example — oral interview: the authenticity of real-life language use.A VTAINGING TINEINUO 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.