DEFINITION OF TERMS

Assessment:
appraising or estimating the level or magnitude of some attribute of a person (Mousavi, 2009). An ongoing process that encompasses a wide range of methodological techniques e.g. students responses, comments or trying out new words / structures. A good teacher never ceases to assess students incidental or intended.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Test:
A method of measuring a persons ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain. A subset of assessment, a genre of assessment techniques. A prepared administrative procedure which occurs 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.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Test:
A method: an instrument a set of techniques, procedures, or items that requires performance on the par of the test-taker. Measure: a process of quantifying a test-takers performance according to explicit procedures or rules (Bachman, 1990). The measurement of individuals ability, knowledge, or performance / competence.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Test:
The measurement of a given domain.
Thus, a well-constructed test is an instrument that provides an accurate measure of the test-takers ability within a particular domain.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Measurement:
The process of quantifying the observed performance of classroom learners. The issue of QUANTITATIVE & QUALITATIVE descriptions of student performance. Quantitative assigning numbers, i.e. rankings and letter grades. Qualitative written descriptions, oral feedback, and other nonquantifiable reports.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Evaluation:
The interpretation of information. Does not necessarily entail testing; rather, evaluation is involved when the results of a test (or other assessment procedure) are used for decision making (Bachman, 1990). I.O.W. you evaluate when you value the results.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Tests Measurement Assessment Teaching

Evaluation

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Language-testing trends and practices have followed the shifting sands of teaching methodology. For examples:
1940s & 1950s an era of behaviourism and special attention to contrastive analysis, language tests focused on specific linguistic elements. 1970s & 1980s communicative theories of language brought with them a more integrative view of testing.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Behavioural Influences on Language Testing:
Through the middle of the 20th century, language teaching and testing strongly influenced by behavioural psychology and structural linguistics. Emphasis on sentence-level grammatical paradigms, definitions of vocabulary items, and translation. Test consisted of grammar and vocabulary items in MCQ with a variety of translation exercises words, sentences, and short paragraphs.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Behavioural Influences on Language Testing:
Discrete-point formats the assumption that language can be broken down into its component parts. The psychometric-structuralist approach test designers seized the tools of the day to focus on issues of validity, reliability, and objectivity.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Integrative Approaches:
In the midst of this fervor, language pedagogy was rapidly moving in more communicative directions. The profession emerged into an era emphasizing communication, authenticity, and context new approaches were sought. John Oller (1979) argued that language competence was a unified set of interacting abilities that could not be tested separately.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Integrative Approaches:
The introduction of integrative testing. Two types: cloze tests and dictations. Proponents of integrative test methods centred their arguments on what became known as the unitary trait hypothesis an invisible view of language proficiency: that vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and the four language skills and other discrete points of language could not be disentangled from each other in language performance. However, it was eventually abandoned.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Communicative Language Testing:
The mid-1980s Canale and Swains (1980) seminal work on communicative competence resulted the language-testing field had begun to focus on designing communicative languagetesting tasks. Bachman and Palmer (1996) included among fundamental principles of language testing the need for a correspondence between language test performance and language use.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Communicative Language Testing:
The problem faced tasks tended to be artificial, contrived, and unlikely to mirror language use in real life. The quest for authenticity centred on communicative performance. Following Canale and Swains (1980) model Bachman (1990) proposed a model of language competence:

Language Competence
Organisational Competence
Grammatical Competence Textual Competence

Pragmatic Competence

Illocutionary Competence

Sociolinguistic Competence

- Vocabulary - Morphology - Cohesion

- Ideational Functions

- Sensitivity to Dialect / Variety - Sensitivity to Register

-Syntax
- Phonology / Graphology

- Rhetorical Organisation

- Manipulative Functions - Heuristic Functions - Imaginative Functions

- Sensitivity to Naturalness
- Cultural References and Figures of Speech

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Communicative Language Testing:
Bachman and Palmer (1996) also emphasised on the importance of strategic competence, i.e. the ability to employ communicative strategies to compensate for breakdowns & enhance rhetorical effect of utterances, in the process of communication. Challenges: to identify the kinds of real-world tasks that language learners to perform, the contexts were too widely varied, & the sampling of tasks for assessment procedure needed to be validated.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Communicative Language Testing:
Weir (1990) to measure language proficiency: where, when, how, with whom, and why language is to be used, and on what topics, and with what effect. The assessment field became more concerned with the authenticity of tasks and the genuineness of texts.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Performance-Based Assessment:
The new and more student-centred agenda. Involve oral production, written production, openended responses, integrated performance (across skill areas), group performance, and other interactive tasks. Time-consuming & relatively expensive; however, result in more direct and more accurate testing students are assessed as they perform actual and stimulated real-world tasks.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Performance-Based Assessment:
Higher content validity learners are measured in the process of performing the targeted linguistic acts. In an English language teaching context teachers may face a difficult time to distinguish between formal and informal assessment. The goals of performance-based assessment will be met if relying a little less on formally structured tests and a little more on evaluation.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Performance-Based Assessment:
A characteristic of many performance-based language assessments is the presence of interactive tasks (a.k.a. task-based assessment). The assessments involve learners in actually performing the behaviour to measure. Test-takers are measured in the act of speaking, requesting, responding, or in combining listening and speaking, and in integrating reading and writing.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT

Performance-Based Assessment:
A prime example oral interview: the authenticity of real-life language use.

CHANGING TRENDS IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT MALAYSIAN CONTEXT

Tutorial questions:
Compare and contrast informal and formal assessments. Compare and contrast the implementation of assessments between the KBSR and KSSR.