1. TESTING, ASSESSING, AND TEACHING
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WHAT IS A TEST?
A method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain.
METHOD
An instrument – a set of techniques, procedures, or items – that requires performance on the test-taker.
The method must be explicit and structured, e.g.:
Multiple-choice questions --- prescribed correct answers
A writing prompt --- scoring rublic
An oral interview --- a questions scripts and a checklist of expected responses

2. Measure A test must measure --- general ability or specific ability
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A test must measure --- general ability or specific ability
The way the results or measurements are communicated may vary, e.g.: a letter grade, a total numerical scores, a percentile rank, and sub-scores.
If a instrument does not specify a form of reporting measurement that technique cannot appropriately be defined as a test.

3. A Person’s/individual’s ability
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A test measure an individual’s ability, knowledge, or performance --- testers need to understand
Who the test-takers are
What is their previous experience and background
Is the test appropriately matched to their abilities
How should test-takers interpret their scores

4. Domain
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A test measure a given domain, e.g.:
A proficiency test – general competence in all skills of a language
More specific criteria, e.g.: a test of pronunciation might well be a test of only a limited set of phonemic minimal pairs, a vocabulary test may focus on only the set of words covered in a particular lesson.
A WELL-CONSTRUCTED TEST IS AN INSTRUMENT THAT PROVIDES AN ACCURATE MEASURE OF THE TEST-TAKER’S ABILITY WITHIN A PARTICULAR DOMAIN

5. ASSESSMENT AND TEACHING
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People might be tempted to think of testing and assessing as synonymous terms, but they are not.
Tests are prepared administrative procedures that occur at identifiable times in a curriculum when learners muster all their faculties to offer peak performance, knowing that their responses are being measured and evaluated.
Assessment is an ongoing process that encompasses a much wider domain, e.g.: a student responds a question, offers a comment, or tries out a new word or structure, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the students’ performance.
Tests are a subtest of assessment; they are certainly not the only form of assessment that a teacher can make.
Tests can be useful devices, but they are only one among many procedures and tasks that teachers can ultimately use to assess students.

6. Figure 1 Test, Assessment, and Teaching ASSESSMENT TEST
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TEACHING
Figure 1 Test, Assessment, and Teaching
ASSESSMENT
TEST

7. Ways of the teacher provides instruction: Informal and formal assessment
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Informal assessment can take a number of forms – incidental, unplanned comments and responses, along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student.
A good deal of a teacher’s informal assessment is embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit performance without recording results and fixed judgments about a student’s competence.
E.g.: informal assessment in forms of marginal comments on papers, responding to a draft of an essay.

8. Informal and formal assessment (continued)
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Formal assessments are exercises or procedures specially designed to tap into a storehouse of skills and knowledge.
They are systematically planned sampling techniques constructed to give teacher and student appraisal of student achievement.
Is formal assessment the same as a test? We can say all tests are formal assessment, but not all formal assessment is testing.
They can be in the forms of student’s journal or portfolio.
A systematic set of observations of a student’s frequency of oral participation in class is certainly a formal assessment.
Tests are usually relatively time-constrained and draw on a limited sample of behavior.

9. The function: Formative and summative assessment
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Formative assessment is evaluating students in the process of “forming” their competencies and skills with the goal of helping them to continue that growth process.
Keys: formation is the delivery (by the teacher) and internalization (by the student) of appropriate feedback on performance, with an eye toward the future continuation (of formation) of learning.
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 does not necessarily point the way to future progress.
Final exams in a course and general proficiency exams are examples of summative assessment.

10. Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests
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In norm-references tests, each test-taker’s score is interpreted in relation to a mean (average score), median (middle score), and standard deviation (extent of variance in scores), and/or percentile rank.
The purpose in such tests is to place test-takers along a mathematical continuum in rank order.
Scores are usually reported back to the test-takers in the form of a numerical scores (e.g., 230 out of 300).
Typical of norm-referenced test are standardized tests like TOEFL.
The tests must have fixed, predetermined responses in a format that can be scored quickly at minimum expense.

11. Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests (continued)
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Criterion-referenced tests are designed to give test-takers feedback, usually in the form of grades, on specific course or lesson objective.
Classroom tests involving the students in only one class, and connected to a curriculum, are typical of criterion-referenced testing.
In a criterion-referenced tests, the distribution of students’ scores across a continuum may be of little concern as long as the instrument assesses appropriate objective.

12. Discrete-point and integrative testing
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Discrete-point tests are constructed on the assumption that language can be broken down into its component parts and that those parts can be tested successfully.
The components are like the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and other various units of language.
Integrative tests are constructed on the assumption that communicative competence is so global and requires such integration.
There are two kinds of tests commonly used applied integrative assumption: cloze test and dictation test.

13. Communicative language testing
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In order for a particular language test to be useful for its intended purposes, test performance must correspond in demonstrable ways to language use in non-test situations.
So a quest for authenticity was launched, as test designers centered on communicative performance.
Strategic competence and pragmatic competence are needed to be included in language tests.
Communicative testing presented challenges to test designers:
testers need to identify real-world task that language learners were called upon to perform.
The contexts for those tasks were extraordinarily widely varied.
The sampling tasks for any one assessment procedure needed to be validated.
The assessment field became more and more concerned with the authenticity of tasks and the genuineness of texts.

14. Performance –based assessment
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In an English language-teaching context, performance-based assessment means that you may have a difficulty time distinguishing between formal and informal assessment.
A characteristic of many (but not all) performance- based assessments is the presence of interactive tasks.
The assessments involve learners in actually performing the behavior that we want to measure.
In interactive tasks, test-takers are measured in the act of speaking, requesting, responding, or in combining listening and speaking, e.g., oral interview and in integrating reading and writing.

15. Approaches to Language Testing
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Approaches to Language Testing
Essay-translation Approach
Structuralist Approach
Integrative Approach
Communicative Approach

16. The Essay-translation Approach
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Tests commonly referred to as the pre-scientific stage of language testing
No special skill or expertise required
Subjective judgment of the teacher is considered to be of paramount importance
Tests usually consist of essay writing, translation, and grammatical analysis
Tests also have a heavy literary and cultural biases

17. The structuralist approach
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The view that language learning is chiefly concerned with the systematic acquisition of a set of habits
Tests measure separate elements of the target language, e.g., phonology, vocabulary, grammar
Mastery of language elements is tested using words and sentences divorced from any context.
Test measure separate the skills of language, e.g., listening, speaking, reading, writing

18. The integrative Approach
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The testing of language in context and thus is concerned primarily with meaning and the total communication effect of discourse.
The tests are often designed to assess the learner’s ability to use two or more skills simultaneously.
The tests are concerned with a global view of proficiency.
The tests are best characterized by the use of Cloze testing and of Dictation.

19. Communicative Approach
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Communicative tests are concerned primarily with how language is used in communication.
Most aim o incorporate tasks which appropriate as closely as possible to those facing the students in real life.
Communicative tests are based on a view of language referred to the divisibility hypothesis.
They result in an attempt to obtain different profiles of a learner’s performance in the language.