Testing technigues for grammar and vocabulary

Testing technigues for grammar and vocabulary

1. We will look at five possible ways of testing for grammar and vocabulary: 1 Selection: true/false and multiple-choice questions 2 Gap-filling 3 Building sentences - recognition ito production 4 Transformations and reformulations 5 Editing

2. Testing techniques: True/false and multiple-choice questions. They only test the student's ability to recognise a correct answer. There may be problems in using true/false questions to test grammar. There is a problem with students guessing the right answer. They are extremely difficult to write. Sometimes true/false or multiple-choice questions are impossible to write.

   • Testing techniques: Gap-filling. "Should ue giue a context or not?" context here means Do we putthe language in its natural environment, or do we use, for example, only single sentences?
     • "Shou/d ue giue a guide Ls to whotto put inthe gap or not?" This raises the question of how much, it any, help we should give the student. Apart from a sample answer, the examples above gave the student no assistance. But we can give the student a certain amount of help as to what goes in the gap.
     • "Shou/d we choose specifc items to be gapped or not?" In the text above, the teacher has decided which words should be omitted. However, an alternative isa cloze test, where words are deleted not according to what we want to test, but on a regular basis.

3. Testing techniques: Building sentences - recognition into production

   • When we want to test students' abilities to build sentences, we have the same decisions tomake about how much we want to help them, and whether to give them some context.
   • Capital letters sometimes tell the student which is the first word. lf you have only one capital letter in the sentence, do you give it a mark (the student has recognised the purpose of the punctuation) or not allocate the first word a mark? Whichever you decide, make sure all the markers/teachers agree!

4. Testing techniques: Transformations and reformulations

   • Another method of holistic testing - that is, not just testing linguistic components but a general ability in the target language - is to see if students can take a sentence/meaning and express itin a different way.
   • Another possibility isto give the students aword or phrase to use in the transformed sentence.

5. Testing techniques: Editing

   • Editing is increasingly used in modern tests. The idea is to find mistakes (or a lack of mistakes) in a text.
   • "Whot isthe ualue of this exercise?"
     • Every mistake you find in a student's work is a mistake they haven't found themselves. We all want students to become more responsible for their learning. This may even be part of their assessment.
     • An essential part of this responsibility is for each student to look at his/her work critically, and these exercises are one of the best ways of encouraging this process.
   • Discrete item tests: error hunt
     • a) muttiple-choice grammar question where more than one of the distractors is possibte! b) a muttipte-choice question where you can answer the question without read'ing the text
       • c) a multipte-choice exercise which has a varying number of distractors (e.g. sometimes three, sometimes four) d) a pure ctoze test (i.e. one where every nth word has been cut out, rather than a grammar test where just the difficutt words have been omitted)
       • e) a transformation exercise that can have more than one answer. f) a jumbl.ed sentence which can be put in two different orders. g) a gap-fitting exercise where the writer tel.ls you if contractions (e.g. don'tl count as one word or two words