Chapter III


 DESIGNING CLASSROOM LANGUAGE TEST

Test Types

The first task you face in designing a test for your students is to determine the purpose for the test. Defining your purpose will help you choose the right kind of test and it will also help you to focus on the specific objectives of the test. Two types to create as a classroom teacher – language aptitude tests and language proficiency tests, and three types that you will almost certainly need to create – placement test, diagnostic tests, and achievement tests.

Language Aptitude Tests

A language aptitude test is designed to measure capacity or general ability to learn a foreign language and ultimate success in that undertaking. Language aptitude tests are ostensibly designed to apply to the classroom learning of any language.

Task in the modern language aptitude test
1. Number learning : Examinees must learn a set of numbers through aural input and then discriminate different combination of those numbers.
2. Phonetic script : Examinees must team a set of correspondences between speech sounds and phonetic symbols.
3. Spelling dues : Examinees must need words that are spelled some what phonetically
4. Word in sentence : Examinees are given a key word in a sentence and are then asked to select a word in second sentence that performs the same grammatical action as the key word.
5. Paired associates : Examinees must quickly team a set of vocabulary words from another language and memorize their English meaning.

Proficiency Tests

A proficiency test is not limited to any one course, curriculum, or single skill in the language, rather, is tests overall ability. Proficiency tests have traditionally consisted of standardized multiple. Choice items on grammar vocabulary, reading comprehension and aural comprehension. Some times also writing is added.
Proficiency test are almost always summative and norm – referenced. For example test of English as a foreign language (TOEFL) produced by the educational testing service.

Placement Tests

Certain proficiency tests can act in the role of placement tests, the purpose of which is to place a student into a particular level or section of language curriculum or school. Placement tests come in many varieties; Assessing comprehension and production, responding through written and oral performance, ended and limited responses, selection (multiple - choice) and gap-filling formats, depending on the nature of a program and its needs.

Diagnostic Tests

A diagnostic tests is designed to diagnose specified aspects of a language. A test in pronunciation, for example. Might diagnose the phonological features of English that are difficult for learners and should there fore become part of a curriculum.
There is also a fine line of difference between a diagnostic test and a general achievement test. Achievement test analyze the extent to which students have acquired language features that have already been taught, diagnostic tests should elicit information on what students need to work on in the future. In a curriculum that has a form – focused phase, for example, a diagnostic test might offer information about a learner’s acquisition of verb tense, modal auxiliaries, definite articles, relative clause and the like.

Achievement Tests

An achievement test is related directly to classroom lessons, units, or even a total curriculum achievement tests are (or should be) limited to particular material addressed in curriculum within a particular time frame and are offered a course has focused on the objectives in question.
Achievement tests are often summative because they are administered at the end of a unit or term of study. The specifications for an achievement test should be determined by :
• The objectives of the lesson, unit, or course being assessed
• The relative importance (or weight) assigned to each objective
• The tasks employed in classroom lessons during the unit of time.

Achievement tests range from five or ten – minute quizzes to three hour final examinations, with an almost in finite variety of item types and formats. Here is the outline for a midterm examination offered at the high intermediate level of an intensive English program in the US

Section A Vocabulary
Part 1 (5 items) : Match words and definitions
Part 2 (5 items) : use the words in a sentence
Section B Grammar
(10 sentences) : error detection (Underline or circle the error)
section C Reading Comprehension
(2 one paragraph passage) : Four short – answer items for each
section D Writing
Respond to a two-paragraph article on Native American culture.