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LANGUAGE TESTING APPROACHES (Communicative Approach ((• Tend to assess…
LANGUAGE TESTING APPROACHES
Communicative Approach
• Rooted in Social constructivism and Functional view of language.
• Focus in social interaction and transaction.
• Ability to employ communicative strategies to compensate breakdowns as well as enhance the rhetorical effect of utterances.
• The test content should totally be relevant for a particular group of examinees and the tasks set should relate to real-life situation.
• The sampling of tasks for any assessment procedure needed to be validated by what language users usually do with language.
• Communicative language tests have to be as accurate a reflection of that situation as possible.
• According to Weir (1990), to measure language proficiency, account must be taken of: where, when, how, with whom, and why language is used, and on what topics, and with what effect.
• Tend to assess communicative competence:
Grammatical competence: Vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology/graphology.
Textual competence: Cohesion, rhetorical organization.
Illocutionary competence: Ideational functions, manipulative functions, heuristic functions, imaginative functions.
Sociolinguistic competence: Sensitivity to dialect or variety, sensitivity to register, sensitivity to naturalness, cultural references and figures of speech.
• It should be interactive.
• It should be direct in nature with tasks reflecting realistic discourse processing activities.
• Texts and tasks should be relevant to the intended situation.
• Ability should be sampled within meaningful and developing contexts.
• The test should be based on an a priori specification, so what is to be tested and how it is to be tested should be laid down at the test design stage. [Adapted from Weir, 1993]
Definition
•The approach beliefs that someone/ a student is considered successful in learning the target language if she/he can communicate or use knowledge and skills by way of authentic listening, speaking, reading and writing.
•Communicative language testing approach is used to measure language learners’ ability to use the target language in authentic situations.
Strengths
• The tests are more realistic to evaluate the students’ language use, as the students in a role as though they were to communicate in the real world / daily lives.
• It increases students’ motivation since they can see the use of language they learnt in class in the real world.
• Communicative tests are able to measure all integrated skills of students.
• The tests using this approach face students in real life so it will be very useful for them.
• Because a communicative test can measure all language skills, it can help students in getting the score. Consider students who have a poor ability in using spoken language but may score quite highly on tests of reading.
• Detailed statements of each performance level serve to increase the reliability of the scoring by enabling the examiner to make decisions according to carefully drawn-up and well-established criteria.
Principles
The principles of testing in the communicative language testing can be describe as the following (Anon,1990):
• Tasks in the test should resemble as far as possible to the ones as would be found in real life in terms of communicative use of language
• There is a call for test items contextualization.
• There is a need to make test items that address a definite audience for a purposeful communicative intent (goal) to be envisioned (might happen).
• Test instructions and scoring plans should touch on effective, communication of meaning rather than on grammatical accuracy
Weaknesses
• Not efficient (time and energy consuming)
• Problem of extrapolation (Weir, 1990) (we cannot guarantee that the students who successfully accomplish the task in class will also be successful in the communication in real life)
• Unlike the structuralist approach, this approach does not emphasize learning structural grammar, yet it may be difficult to achieve communicative competence without a considerable mastery of the grammar of a language.
• It is possible for cultural bias to affect the reliability of the tests being administered.
Integrative Approach
Definition
This approach stated that communicative competence is so global that it requires the integration of all linguistic abilities.
An integrative test integrates various language skills such as syntax, vocabulary, "schema," cultural awareness, reading skills, pronunciation and grammar to measure language competence.
According to Oller (1983), if discrete items take language skill apart, integrative tests put it back together; whereas discrete items attempt to test knowledge of language a bit at a time, integrative tests attempt to assess a learner’s capacity to use many bits all at the same time.
Characteristics
• This approach involves the testing of language in context and is thus concerned primarily with meaning and the total communicative effect of discourse.
• Integrative tests are concerned with a global view of proficiency or language testing.
• Integrative testing involves functional language but not the use of functional language.
• Assess language in meaningful, contextualized context.
• Provide real life situations in tests.
• Regards language ability as indivisible.
• Tend to integrate linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects.
• Assess the ability of more than one skill simultaneously.
Strengths
• The approach to meaning and the total communicative effect of discourse will be very useful for pupils in testing
• This approach can view pupils’ proficiency with a global view.
• The strength of the test such as dictation, writing, and cloze test is that relatively cheap and easy to make
• A model cloze test used in this approach measures the reader’s ability to decode ‘interrupted’ and ‘mutilated’ messages by making the most acceptable substitutions from all the contextual clues available.
• Dictation, another type using this approach, was regarded solely as a means of measuring students’ skills of listening comprehension.
Weaknesses
• Even if measuring integrated skills are better but sometimes teacher should consider the importance of measuring skills based on particular need, such as writing only, speaking only
• The scoring is not efficient and not reliable
• Even if many think that measuring integrated skills is better, sometimes there is a need to consider the importance of measuring skills based on students’ need, such as writing only, speaking only, etc.
Examples
Cloze Test
• The principles of cloze testing are based on the Gestalt theory. It measures the reader’s ability to decode interrupted or mutilated messages by making the most acceptable substitutions from all the contextual clues.
• There are two methods of scoring a cloze test: acceptable answer and exact answer.
• Three types of knowledge are required to perform success cloze test: linguistic knowledge, textual knowledge and knowledge of the world.
Dictation
• This type of test is a means of measuring students’ skills of listening comprehension.
• In a dictation, the learners have to reconstruct what they hear according to their internalized abilities in all skill areas.
• Some teachers may object, saying the word order, structures and vocabulary are all provided by the test giver during the test. However, a study of student errors shows this is not true.
• "This can easily be proved by looking at the kind of errors that people make in taking dictation," Oller writes. "A word like 'eloquence' may be rendered 'elephants,' a word like 'ways' may be rendered 'waves,' a phrase such as 'scientists from many nations' may be rendered 'scientists' imaginations.' These are examples from actual dictations."
• On an English dictation, for example, learners tend to leave off verb inflections — "He run" for "He runs," "They play" for "They played" — or mistake singular for plural.
• Success requires careful listening, reproduction in writing of what is heard, efficient short-term memory and to an extent some expectancy rules to aid the short-term memory.