Good teaching includes testing'. Discuss, making reference to aims and backwash.

Good tests

Good tests are those that do the job they are designed to do and which convince the people taking and marking them that they work. Good tests also have a positive rather than a negative effect on both students and teachers.

A good test is valid. This means that it does what it says it will. In other words, if we say that a certain test is a good measure of a student's reading ability, then we need to be able to show that this is the case. There is another kind of validity, too, in that when students and teachers see the test, they should think it looks like the real thing - that it has face validity. As they sit in front of their test paper or in front of the screen, the students need to have confidence that this test will work (even if they are nervous about their own abilities). However reliable the test is (see below) face validity demands that the students think it is reliable and valid.

A good test should have marking reliability. Not only should it be fairly easy to mark, but anyone marking it should come up with the same result as someone else. However, since different people can (and do) mark differently, there will always be the danger that where tests involve anything other than computer-scorable questions, different results will be given by different markers. For this reason, a test should be designed to minimise the effect of individual marking styles.

When designing tests, one of the things we have to take into account is the practicality of the test. We need to work out how long it will take both to sit the test and also to mark it. The test will be worthless if it is so long that no one has the time to do it. In the same way, we have to think of the physical constraints of the test situation. Some speaking tests, especially for international exams, ask not only for an examiner but also for an interlocutor (someone who participates in a conversation with a student). But this is clearly not practical for teachers working on their own.

Finally, we need to remember that tests have a powerful effect on student motivation.

Firstly, students often work a lot harder than normal when there is a test or examination in sight. Secondly, they can be greatly encouraged by success in tests, or, conversely, demotivated by doing badly. For this reason, we may want to try to discourage students from taking public examinations that they are clearly going to fail, and when designing our own progress and achievement tests, we may want to consider the needs of all our students, not just the ones who are doing well. This does not mean writing easy tests, but it does suggest that when writing progress tests, especially, we do not want to design the test so that students fail unnecessarily - and are consequently demotivated by the experience.

Test types

When designing tests, we can either write discrete items, or ask students to become involved in more integrative language use. Discrete-item testing means only testing one thing at a time (e.g. testing a verb tense or a word), whereas integrative testing means asking students to use a variety of language and skills to complete a task successfully. A further distinction needs to be made between direct and indirect test items. A direct test item is one that asks students to do something with language (e.g. write a letter, read and reply to a newspaper article or take part in a conversation). Direct test items are almost always integrative. Indirect test items are those which test the students' knowledge of language rather than getting them to use it. Indirect test items might focus on, say, word collocations (see page 75) or the correct use of modal verbs (see page 69). Direct test items have more to do with activation, whereas indirect items are more closely related to study- that is the construction of language.

Indirect test items

There are many different ways of testing the students' knowledge of language construction. We will look at three of the most common.

Multiple choice

Multiple-choice questions are those where students are given alternatives to choose from, as in the following example:

Sometimes students are instructed to choose the 'correct' answer (because only one answer is possible), as in the example above. But sometimes, instead, they can be told to choose the 'best' answer (because, although more than one answer is possible, one stands out as the most appropriate), e.g.

Circle the best answer.

Police are worried about the level of _______ crime.

a juvenile b childish c young d infant

Multiple-choice questions have the great advantage of being easy to mark. Answer sheets can be read by computer, or can be marked by putting a transparency over the answer sheet which shows the circled correct letters. Markers do not have to worry, then, about the language in the questions; it is simply a matter of checking the correct letters for each question.

Multiple-choice questions can be used to test reading and listening comprehension (we can also use true/false questions for this: students circle 'T' or 'F' next to statements concerning material they have just read or listened to).

Fill-in and doze

This extremely common form of indirect testing involves the examinee writing a word in a gap in a sentence or paragraph, e.g.

Yesterday I went a __ the cinema b __ my friend Clare. I enjoyed the film c __ she did not.

Gap-fill (or fill-in) items like this are fairly easy to write, though it is often difficult to leave a gap where only one item is possible. In such cases, we will need to be aware of what different answers we can accept. They also make marking a little more complex, though we can design answer sheets where students only have to write the required word against different letters, e.g.

A variation on fill-ins and gap-fills is the doze procedure, where gaps are put into a text at regular intervals (say every sixth word). As a result, without the test writer having to think about it too much, students are forced to produce a wide range of different words based on everything from collocation to verb formation, etc, as in the following example.

All around the world, students a __ all ages are learning to b __ English, but their reasons for c__ to study English can differ d __. Some students, of course, only

e __ English because it is on f _________ curriculum at primary or secondary g __ ,

but for others, studying the h _______ reflects some kind of a i __ .

Transformation

In transformation items students are asked to change the form of words and phrases to show their knowledge of syntax and word grammar. In the following test type they are given a sentence and then asked to produce an equivalent sentence using a given word:

Rewrite the sentence so that it means the same. Use the word in bold Could I borrow five pounds, please?

lend ____________________

In order to complete the item successfully, the students not only have to know the meaning of borrow and lend, but also how to use them in grammatical constructions.

A variation of this technique is designed to focus more exactly on word grammar. Here, students have to complete lines in a text using the correct form of a given word, e.g.

It was a terryfying performance. terrify

The acrobats showed __________ no fear even though absolute

their feats of __________ shocked the crowd into stunned silence. dare

Direct test items

In direct test items, we ask students to use language to do something, instead of just testing their knowledge of how the language itself works. We might ask our students to write instructions for a simple task (such as using a vending machine or assembling a shelving system) or to give an oral mini-presentation.

There is no real limit to the kinds of tasks we might ask students to perform. The following list gives some possibilities:

Reading and listening

Some reading and writing test items look a bit like indirect items (e.g. when students are given multiple-choice questions about a particular word in a text, for example, or have to answer T IF questions about a particular sentence). But at other times we might ask students to choose the best summary of what they have heard or read. We might ask them to put a set of pictures in order as they read or listen to a story, or complete a phone message form (for a listening task) or fill out a summary form (for a reading task).

Many reading and listening tests are a blend of direct and indirect testing. We can ask students direct language - or text-focused - questions as well as testing their global understanding.

Writing

Direct tests of writing might include getting students to write leaflets based on information supplied in an accompanying text, or having them write compositions, such as narrative and discursive essays. We can ask students to write 'transactional letters' (that is letters replying to an advertisement, or something they have read in the paper, etc). In transactional writing we expect students to include and refer to information they are given.

Speaking

We can interview students, or we can put them in pairs and ask them to perform a number of tasks. These might include having them discuss the similarities and differences between two pictures (see information-gap activities on page 129); they might discuss how to furnish a room, or talk about any other topic we select for them. We can ask them to roleplay certain situations (see page 125), such as buying a ticket or asking for information in a shop, or we might ask them to talk about a picture we show them.

When designing direct test items for our students, we need to remember two crucial facts. The first is that, as with indirect tests, direct tests should have items which look like the kind of tasks students have been practising in their lessons. In other words, there is no point in giving students tasks which, because they are unfamiliar, confuse them. The result of this will be that students cannot demonstrate properly how well they can use the language, and this will make the test worthless.

Direct test items are much more difficult to mark than indirect items. This is because our response to a piece of writing or speaking will almost certainly be very subjective -

unless we do something to modify this subjectivity. We will now go on to look at how this can be done.

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