Types of language
assessment instruments
Designing and writing a quiz or test, requires that we consider
just what it is we want to measure and why. One way to describe
language assessment instruments is according to their function
or purpose – that is, for administrative, instructional,
or research purposes (Jacobs, Zingraf, Wormuth,
Hartfiel, & Hughey,
1981). In fact, the same test could conceivably be used for twelve
different
purposes: five administrative purposes
(assessment, placement, exemption, certification, promotion), four
instructional purposes (diagnosis, evidence of progress, feed-back
to the respondent, evaluation of teaching or curriculum), and three
research purposes (evaluation, experimentation, knowledge about
language learning and language use). The average test will probably
only be used for one or perhaps two purposes by a given individual.
Sometimes, teachers, administrators, and researchers will use the
same test for their respective purposes. More information on the
purposes of assessment can be found in the Why
Assess section.
Criteria for describing assessments
When describing assessments, the distinction is often made between
proficiency tests, intended for administrative purposes,
and achievement tests, intended for assessment of instructional
results.
Administrative, instructional, and research purposes are represented
in the graphic below:
Norm-referenced and Criterion-referenced
A distinction in testing is made between norm-referenced
and criterion-referenced assessment as well. A test can
be used, for example, to compare a student with other students,
whether locally (e.g., in a class), regionally, or nationally as
in SAT or ACT tests. Classroom, regional, or national norms may
be established to interpret just how one student compares with another.
Sometimes teachers speak of using a “curve,” which simply
means that they evaluate a student’s performance in comparison
with that of other students in the same class or in other classes.
A test can also be used to determine whether a respondent has met
certain instructional objectives or criteria. For this reason, such
a test would be referred to as “criterion-referenced”
assessment.
Communicative and Strategic Competence
The now seminal effort by Canale and Swain (1980; Canale, 1983)
to define communicative competence provided another set
of criteria for describing tests. Tests are seen as tapping one
or more of the four components that make up communicative competence:
Grammatical competence was seen to encompass
“knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology,
syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology” (Canale
& Swain, 1980, p. 29).
Discourse competence was defined as the ability
to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful
whole out of a series of utterances.
Sociolinguistic competence was defined as involving
knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse.
Strategic competence was seen to refer to “the
verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called
into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due
to performance variables or due to insufficient competence”
(Canale & Swain, 1980, p. 30).
While Canale and Swain's strategic competence puts the
emphasis on "compensatory" strategies – that is,
strategies used to compensate or remediate for a lack in some language
area, the term has come to take on a broader meaning: Bachman (1990)
provided a broader theoretical model of strategic competence by
separating it into three components. Later, Bachman and Palmer (1996)
refined the Bachman (1990) categories for strategic competence to
include four components:
Assessment – Respondents (in our case
of language testing) assess which communicative goals are achievable
and what linguistic resources are needed;
Goal-setting – Respondents identify the
specific tasks to be performed;
Planning – Respondents retrieve the relevant
items from their language knowledge and plan their use;
Execution – Respondents implement the
plan. Hence, this latest framework for strategic competence is
broad and includes test-taking strategies within it.
Sociocultural and sociolinguistic competence
Over the last several decades, the Canale and Swain model has also
undergone several modifications. For example, sociolinguistic
competence is seen as encompassing two relatively distinct
components:
Sociocultural component – assesses the
appropriateness of the strategies selected for language performance
in a given context, taking into account (1) the culture involved,
(2) the age and sex of the speakers, (3) their social class and
occupations, and (4) their roles and status in the interaction.
For example, whereas in some cultures (such as in the U.S.) it
may be appropriate for speakers to suggest a time a boss when
they will get a report in after having missed missing a deadline,
in other cultures (in Israel, for example) such a repair strategy
might be considered out of place in that it would most likely
be the boss who determines what happens next.
The scale for sociocultural ability also rates what is said in
terms of the amount of information required in the given situation,
and the relevance and clarity of the information provided.
Sociolinguistic component – assesses the
use of linguistic forms in language performance.
For example when a student bumps into a professor, spilling her
coffee on the professor’s dress, “Sorry!” would
probably constitute an inadequate apology. This category assesses
the speakers’ control over the actual language forms used
to realize the speech function, in this case referred to as a
speech act (such
as, “sorry,” “excuse me,” “very
sorry,” “really sorry”), as well as their control
over register or formality of the utterance from most intimate
to most formal language.
|
