Posted: May 30th, 2015

Topic: Second Language Testing

Teaching context

The majority of my students are from Saudi Arabia, and some of them are from Egypt and Jordan. Their age between 15-18 and they have different culture of learning. To illustrate, they have a different awareness of what they have to do and what the important information they have to receive. I can say that they have (individual differences of receiving the information). They are studying English as a foreign language, as a part of their curriculum, and an important requirement to complete their stage. The significant factor why they are studying English that because they want to have a good job when they finish, also, they want to have a better background of English for many purposes like travelling to another country and feel free to speak because they can speak a language that everybody around this world can understand.

 

Language abilities

By the end of the course, the students have learned the four skills of English, which are reading, writing, speaking and listening. The main purposes are to prepare them to use each skill in its correct form and to identify their self in a correct grammar and correct form of English. Also, they have to be aware of how to be able to respond to another by using formal English. As I mentioned, there are four skills that students are dealing with. But in particular, this assessment will measure three abilities, vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension. Their vocabulary-quit good because the revelation of technology, they know about many words even some words we didn’t take it in class. The ability of their grammar is not bad, they learnt different tenses if grammar and how to use them in correct form. They have been presented to many texts, paragraphs and short stories. Their reading and understanding is very good, the have the ability to scan and skim. Furthermore, they can distinguish between the main idea and supporting sentences in a text.

 

 

Assessment description

This assessment is final test at the end of the course. In this assessment, I will assess pupils’ vocabulary, grammar and the ability of their comprehension reading. So, I decided to use (Assessing Reading) and I will choose booth selective and interactive reading.

 

1. The first part will be about word builder; in this section I will assess their vocabulary that they have learnt during the course. I will do my best in order to figure out their ability of receiving the vocabs and do they really understood what do these vocabs mean in many context. So, in this section I will use selective reading types:
2. Multiple-Choice vocabulary tasks.
3. Vocabulary matching task

 

(Total marks 20)

 

 

2. The second part will be about Grammar builder; in this section I will assess their ability of using grammar in correct way, trying to know, do they have ability to distinguish between many tenses of grammar and do they know how to use it in a correct form?. In this part I will use selective reading types:
3. Multiple-choice grammar editing task.
4. Multiple-choice grammar tasks

 

(Total marks 15)

 

 

3. The last part will be about comprehension reading; in this section I will provide them two passages. In the first passage, I will see if they have the ability to read and answer the questions in a full sentence depending on their understanding of the passage. In the second passage I will give them multiple-choice questions and ask them to choose the correct answer. Afterwards, I will figure out if they can rearrange a short paragraph in a correct way, then I will figure out if they could understand the missing gap through a short text. In this part I will use interactive reading type:
4. Open-ending reading comprehension question.
5. Reading comprehension passage.
6. Sentence-ordering task.
7. Cloze procedure, fixed-ratio deletion.

 

Total marks (42)

 

 

All the questions of this assessment are organized to be appropriate for students for their level.

General instructions:

• The students will not be able to go outside during the exam
• There are three supervisor during the exam
• All the supervisor have the ability to communicate with the students in English during the exam
• The students will be provided water if they ask
• Students will be given 10 mins to prepare their self before the exam start.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Practicality

Assessment is an essential part for all teachers. Through assessment teachers have to be able to consider the conditions that are required to direct the assessment procedure for the students (Graves, 2000). Therefore, my assessment is practical and has followed the following criteria that (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010) point out:

* Providing enough time to finish the assessment is very important for teacher who will take the test to consider. Therefore, the teacher should give the students sufficient time to read the questions, understand the questions, answer the questions and review their answers when they finish.

* The teacher will describe all the questions for the students and if any student got stuck, the teacher will help him to understand the question.

* All the materials that required for this assessment has provided to all students and it was too cheap.

* Some materials such as pens, papers, pencils and erasers should be presented in the school and all the students have the chance to go and take what ever they want.

* This assessment is easy to mark and it will take short period of time because each question worth one mark. And it has its model of answer.

* This assessment held in the school in a well-organised classroom, with   suitable lighting, clear papers and separation from street noisy.

 

 

Reliability

The reliability should exist in the assessment of language. Hughes (2003) argues that if the assessment processes do not have the ability to assess the language ability of student, then it will be just waste of time, materials and money. Brown and Abeywicrama (2010) point out that the assessment reliability might be affect by four factors:

 

Students:

 

The students have to be familiar with the assessment. So, they have taken many quizzes during the course and activities. As a result, this will help them to be familiar with assessment and to avoid the difficulties to answering the exam. Bachman (1990) states that the reliability of assessment might be affected by some factors. Sometimes students have a bad day, illness and tired.

 

Rater Reliability:

The rater is the teacher and how will he or she mark the assessment. Brown and Abeywickrama, (2010) point that the lack of experience of the teacher can be the significant factor to reduce the reliability of the assessment. For this assessment I will be the person who will score this assessment. So, I will be equal in order to increase the reliability when marking this assessment.

 

Assessment Administration:

The classroom that I use to this assessment is full of light, far away from noise of street and the chairs is comfortable.

 

Assessment Reliability:

According to Bachman (1990), there are some factors might contribute to unreliability. So, all the questions are easy to understand and the time limit is sufficient for students to complete all the questions.

 

Validity:

Every assessment should has its validity, in other words, does the assessment assess what is supposed to assess. For example, if the assessment sets to measure the student’s vocabulary ability, it should just contain vocabulary elements (Brown, 2004). Therefore, in my assessment I focused on vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension and that what students have covered in their course. Also, I did not use any information outside the curriculum. Moreover, there are five types of validity:

 

Content validity refers to all the questions that we have used in the assessment should represent the ability that we want to assess (Bachman, 2004). So, this assessment has reflected all the ability that I am going to assess.

 

Criterion Validity refers to the results that represent the ability of students. So, in this assessment it has appeared that there is a relationship between the assessment and the results of the students.

 

Construct validity means for example, the teacher want to assess the comprehension student’s ability, so in this case he has to be sure that the test has passages or texts.

 

Consequential validity means that the parts of the assessment should be consequentially processed (Bachman, 1990)

 

Face Validity means, does the assessment assess the ability or abilities that it is planned to assess (Bachman, 1990). In this assessment my planning was to assess students vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension and all questions about these skills.

 

 

Authenticity

Authenticity means, does the questions in the assessment reflects the real life of the students. Therefore, the majority of the tasks and questions in this assessment do reflect the real life of Saudi students because it takes place in their couture. Most of the vocabulary that I have used talks about cities in Saudi Arabia. Also, I choose a passage that talk about Saudi currency in order to make this assessment authentic. Also, all the questions that I have used are relevant to the students, as I tend to use a passage, which is interesting to the students. Moreover, all the questions and tasks have replicated real-world tasks.

 

Washback

 

Alderson and Wall (1993) state that washback theory has set in order to see how assessment affects both teaching and learning. So, in this assessment I have worked hard in order to reach the positive washback by applying the following:

 

• I have assessed the abilities that students should increase.
• I have included many questions and tasks that will support to assess the students in many areas during the course.
• All the questions that I have choose is differ because I this assessment based on vocabs, grammar and comprehension.
• The assessment was direct and easy to follow and there is ambiguity that will let students to get stuck.
• All the questions and tasks that I have used were based on goals and objectives.
• All the instructions and directions are clear and the questions are clear to read and understood by both teachers and students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References list:

 

Alderson, J. C., & Wall, D. (1993). Does washback exist? Applied Linguistics, 14(2), 115-129.

 

Batchman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University.

 

Brown, H. D. (2004). Language assessment: Principals and classroom practices. New York: Pearson Education Inc.

 

           Brown, H. D. & Abeywickrama, P. (2010). Language assessment: Principles and classroom practices (2^nd ed.). New York: Pearson Education Inc.

 

Hughes, A. (2003). Testing for language teachers (2^nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.