Assessment: is appraising or estimating the level or magnitude of some attribute

of a person. It is ongoing process that contains a wide range of methodological

techniques. Whenever a student respond to a question, offers a comment, or tries
out a new word or structure, the teacher subconsciously makes an appraisal of the
student’s performance.
Tests: are a subset of assessment, a genre of assessment techniques. They are
prepared administrative producers that occur at identifiable time in a curriculum
when students muster all their faculties to offer peak performance, knowing that
their responses are being measured and evaluated.
Scientifically, the test is a method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or
performance in a given domain.
1- It is a method (it is an instrument – a set of techniques, producers, or items
that requires a performance on the part of the test-taker.
- The test must be (explicit) and (structured)

2- It is measurement: it is a process of quantifying a test-taker’s performance

according to explicit producers or rules.
-some tests measure general ability. others focus on very specific
competencies or objectives.
- a test measure individual’s ability, knowledge, or performance.
- a test measures but the results imply the test taker’s ability or competence.
3- a test measures a given domain.
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 Measurement and evaluation

Measurement: is a process of quantifying the observed performance of classroom

learners. There are two types of measurements qualitative and quantitative.
1- Quantitative measurement: involves assigning numbers (including rankings
and letter grades) to observed performance.
2- Qualitative measurement: it is also called verbal or descriptive measurement.
It consists of written descriptions, oral feedback and other nonquantifiable
reports.
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Q// what are the advantages of quantifiable measurement?

1- Numbers allow us to provide exact descriptions of student’s performance.

2- To compare one student to another more easily.
3- They also can spur us to be explicit in our specifications for scoring
student performance thus leading us to greater objectivity.
4- Quantification can work against the teacher or tester.
Q// what are the advantages of qualitative measurement?
-it may offer an opportunity for a teacher to individualize feedback to a
student, such as in marginal comments on a student’s written work and oral
feedback on pronunciation.
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Evaluation: it is involved when the results of a test are used for decision
making. Evaluation involves the interpretation of information. Evaluation
occurs when you value the results of the test.

 evaluation is not the same as testing.

 Q/// Does all testing involve assessment?
- The answer depends on the perspective of the teacher. For optimal learning to
take place, students in the classroom must have the freedom to experiment, to
try out their own hypothesis about the language without feeling that their
overall competence is being judged in terms of their trials and errors.
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Formal and informal Assessment

Informal assessment: it can take a number of forms, starting with incidental,

unplanned comments and responses, along with coaching and other impromptu
feedback to the students. For example when the teacher says “nice job!”
Informal assessment:
1- Elicit information without recording results and making fixed conclusions
about student’s performance.
2- It is judgmental.
Formal assessment: are exercises or procedures specifically designed to tap into a
storehouse of skills and knowledge. They are systematic, planned sampling
techniques constructed to give teacher and student an appraisal of student
achievement.
 All tests are formal assessment but not all formal assessment is testing.
 Formative and Summative Assessment

Formative assessment: evaluating students in the process of “forming” their

competencies and skills with goal of helping them to continue that growth process.
The key to such formation is the delivery (by the teacher) and internalization (by
the student) of appropriate feedback on performance, with an eye toward the future
continuation or (formation) of learning.
 All kinds of informal assessment are formative. They have as their primary
focus the ongoing development of learner’s language.
Summative assessment: aims to measure, or summarize, what a student has
grasped and typically occurs at the end of a course or unit of instruction. A
summation of what a student has learned implies looking back and taking stock of
how well that student has accomplished objectives, but it doesn’t necessarily point
the way to future progress. Final exams in a course and general proficiency exams
are examples of summative assessment.
 Summative assessment often but not always involves evaluation (decision
making).

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Types of Assessments

Q// What are the purposes of tests?

1- It may be used for measuring proficiency.
2- Placing students into one of several levels of a course.
3- Diagnosing students; strength and weaknesses according to specific linguistic
categories.
4- Classroom-based teacher made tests might be used to diagnose difficulty or
measure achievement in a given unit of a course.
 1- Achievement tests: its main purposes is to measure learner’s ability within
a classroom lesson, unit, or even total curriculum. They are and should be
limited to particular material addressed in a curriculum within a particular
time frame and are offered after a course has been focused on the
objectives.
 The primary role of achievement tests is to determine whether course
objectives have been met and appropriate knowledge and skills acquired by
the end of a given period of instruction.
 Achievement tests can also have a diagnostic role of indicating what a
student needs to continue to work on in the future.
 Achievement tests are summative because they are administered at the end
of the lesson, unit, or a term of study.
 Achievement tests also have formative role because an effective
achievement test will offer feedback about the quality of a learner’s
performance in subset of the unit or course.
 Achievement test range from 5- or 10 minute quizzes to three-hour final
examinations.
2) Diagnostic test: it is used to diagnose aspects of a language that a student needs
to develop or that a course should include.
* achievement tests analyze the extent to which students have acquired language
features that they have already been taught.
*diagnostic tests should elicit information on what students need to work on in the
future. Therefore, a diagnostic test will offer more detailed, subcategorized
information on the learner.
3) Placement test: the purpose of which is to place a student into a particular level
or section of a language curriculum or school. It usually but not always includes a
sampling of the material to be covered in the various courses in a curriculum. An
achievement and proficiency tests are an example of placement tests.
* placement test should be diagnostic.
* placement test takes on a formative role.
* it comes in many varieties (assessing comprehension and production, responding
through written and oral performance, open-ended and limited responses, selection
(multiple-choice) and gap-filling formats.
4) Proficiency Tests: it is used to test global competence in a language. It is not
limited to any one course, curriculum, or single skill in a language, rather it tests
overall ability. It consists of multiple – choice items on grammar, vocabulary,
reading comprehension, and aural comprehension. TOEFL is an example of
proficiency (Test of English as a Foreign Language).
* They are almost always summative and norm-referenced.
* They provide results in the form of a single score.

5) Aptitude Test: it is designed to measure capacity or general ability to learn a

foreign language priori (before taking a course) and ultimate predicted success in
that undertaking. Language aptitude tests were designed to apply to the classroom
learning of any language. Two standardized aptitude tests were once used in the
United States 1-MLAT (Modern Language Aptitude) 2-PLAB (Pimsleur Language
Aptitude Battery). Both are English language tests and require students to perform
language-related tasks such as distinguishing speech sounds, detecting grammatical
functions and memorizing paired associates.

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Integrative Approaches
John Oller (1979) argued that language competence was a unified set of interacting
abilities that could not be tested separately. His claim was that communicative
competence is so global and requires such integration that it can’t be captured in
additives tests of grammar, reading, vocabulary and other discrete points of
language. It is later called integrative testing.
Q// What are the types of integrative test?
1-A cloze test: it is a reading passage (perhaps 150 to 300 words) in which roughly
every sixth or seventh word has been deleted, the test-taker is required to supply
words that fit into those blanks. The ability to supply appropriate words in the
blanks requires competence in a language, which includes knowledge of
vocabulary, grammatical structure, discourse structure, reading skills and
strategies; and an “expectancy” grammar.
 Expectancy grammar: enabling one to predict an item that will come next
in a sequence.

2- Dictation: in which learners listen to a short passage and write what they
hear, is a familiar language-teaching technique that evolved into a testing
technique. Supporters argued that dictation was an integrative test because
it taps into grammatical and discourse competencies required for other
modes of performance in a language. Success on a dictation test requires
careful listening, reproduction in writing of what is hear, efficient short-
term memory, and to an extent, some expectancy rules to aid the short-term
memory.
3- Performance-Based Assessment: it involves oral production, written
production, open-ended responses, integrated performance, group
performance, and other interactive tasks. It is also called task-based
assessment.
 Chapter Two
Principles of language assessment

Q//What are the principles of language assessment?

1- Practicality
2- Reliability
3- Validity
4- Authenticity
5- Washback
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1-Practicallity: refers to the logical, down-to earth administrative issues involved
in making, giving, and scoring an assessment instrument. These include “costs”,
the amount of time it takes to construct and to administer, ease of scoring, and ease
of interpreting.
Attributes of practical test:
1- Stays within budgetary limits.
2- Can be completed by the test-taker within appropriate time constraints.
3- Has clear direction for administration.
4- Appropriately utilizes available human resources.
5- Doesn’t exceed available human resources.
6- Consider the time and effort involved for both design and scoring.
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2-Reliability: a reliable test is consistent and dependable. If you give the same test
to the same student or matched students on two different occasions, the test should
give the same results.
Attributes of reliable test:
1- Is consistence in its conditions across two or more administrations.
2- Gives clear directions for scoring/ evaluation.
3- Has uniform rubrics for scoring/ evaluation.
4- Lends itself to consistent application of those rubrics by the scorer.
5- Contains items/ tasks that are unambiguous to the test-taker.
3-Validity: the extent to which inferences are made from assessment results are
appropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment.
Attributes of a valid test:
1- Measures exactly what it proposes to measure.
2- Doesn’t measure irrelevant or contaminating “variables”
3- Relies as much as possible on empirical evidence (performance)
4- Involves performance that samples the test’s criterion. (objective)
5- Offers useful, meaningful information about a test-taker’s ability.
6- Is supported by a theoretical rationale or argument.
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4-Authenticity: the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given
language test task to the features of a target language task. Authentic test task
should be enacted in the real world.
Attributes of an authentic test:
1- Contains language that is as natural as possible.
2- Has items that are contextualized rather than isolated.
3- Includes meaningful, relevant, interesting topics.
4- Provide some thematic organization to items, such as through a story line or
episode.
5- Offers tasks that replicate real-world tasks
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5-Washback: the effect of testing on teaching and learning.
Attributes of a washback test:
1- Positively influences what and how the teachers teach.
2- Positively influences what and how the learners learn.
3- Offers the learners a chance to adequately prepare.
4- Gives learners feedback that enhances their language development.
5- Is more formative than is summative.
6- Provides conditions for peak performance by the learner.