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Historical Development in Language Assessment

The document summarizes the historical development of language assessment from the 1940s to the present. It describes the evolution from behaviourist and structuralist approaches focusing on grammar and translation in the 1940s-1950s, to more integrative and communicative methods in the 1970s-1980s assessing overall proficiency. More recently, the focus has shifted to performance-based assessment involving interactive tasks to better measure authentic language use.

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1K views1 page

Historical Development in Language Assessment

The document summarizes the historical development of language assessment from the 1940s to the present. It describes the evolution from behaviourist and structuralist approaches focusing on grammar and translation in the 1940s-1950s, to more integrative and communicative methods in the 1970s-1980s assessing overall proficiency. More recently, the focus has shifted to performance-based assessment involving interactive tasks to better measure authentic language use.

Uploaded by

Yap Sze Miin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Historical Development in Language Assessment

1940s-1950s
Behaviourism
Teaching Methodology

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.

Assessment Method

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
1980s-1990s
Communicative
Language Teaching

Teaching Methodology

The quest for authenticity centred


on communicative performance.

Assessment Method

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.

1970s-1980s
Integrative
Teaching Methodology 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.

Assessment Method

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
New Era
Performance-Based
Assessment
Teaching Methodology

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.
Higher content validity learners
are measured in the process of
performing the targeted linguistic
acts.

Assessment Method
The goals of performance-based
assessment will be met if relying a
little less on formally structured
tests and a little more on
evaluation.
Test-takers are measured in the act
of
speaking,
requesting,

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