‫ح‬

‫سم ہللا الر ٰمن الرحی م‬ ‫ب‬

 DIRECT AND
INDIRECT
APPROACHES OF TEST CONSTRUCTION

BY : ABRAIZ ANZA
BS ENGLISH 2K19
DIRECT TESTING
• In Direct testing;
• The candidate have to perform precisely the skill which the test taker wish
to measure.
• To know how well candidates can write compositions, the test taker ask
them to write compositions.
• To know how good they pronounce a language, the tester get them to
speak.
• The tasks and the texts which are used in testing should be as authentic as
possible.
BENEFITS OF DIRECT TESTING

• Is easier to carry out with productive skills of reading and writing.

• Relatively straightforward to create the conditions we want to test.
• Assessment and Interpretation of students’ performance is also
straightforward.
• Practice for the test involves practice of the skills we wish to foster –
helpful backwash!
PROBLEMS OF DIRECT TESTING

• There are practically limited recourses in direct testing.

• Limited to the small sample of the tasks, which may call on a restricted and
possibly unrepresentative range of grammatical structures.
INDIRECT TESTING
• Indirect testing attempts to measure the abilities which underlie the skills
in which the tester is interested.
• For example, one section of the TOEFL was developed as as an indirect
measure of writing ability.
• At first the old women seemed unwilling to accept anything that was
offered her by my friend and I.
• The candidate has to identify which of the underlined elements is
erroneous or inappropriate in formal standard English.
• Another example of indirect testing is Lado’s (1961) proposed method to
testing pronunciation ability by a paper and pencil test In which the
candidate has to identify pairs of words which rhyme with each other.
BENEFITS AND PROBLEMS OF INDIRECT
TESTING
• Offers possibility of testing a representative sample of a finite number of
abilities (e.g. vocabulary, grammatical structures) which underlie a potentially
indefinitely large number of manifestations of them.
• Danger is in that the mastery of the underlying micro-skills does not always
lead to mastery of larger skills from which these emanate.
• The relationship between performance on them and performance of the skills
in which we are usually more interested tends to be rather weak in strength
and uncertain in nature.
CONCLUSION

• Ideally speaking – we should have a combination of both!

• which should lead to beneficial backwash in that the teaching would hence
focus on both the greater skills and the micro-skills that underlie them.
THANK YOU!