Testing Language Skills for Educational Research

Testing Language Skills for Educational Research

Written by Ari Julianto



In conducting educational research, one of the instruments mostly used by researchers is a test. The test in educational research usually is an achievement test. It means that a test where the individual's grade is a measure of how  well he or she did on comparison with a large group of test takers.

In educational research based on the problem of the research, the researcher commonly use a test as the instrument of the research. Creswell (2012: 151) states that instrument is a tool for measuring, observing, or documenting quantitative data.

I. Definition of Test
According to Richards and Scmidt (2002: 546) a test is defines as any procedure for measuring ability, knowledge, or performance. They add that test item is a question or element in a test that requires an answer or response.

Meanwhile OOsterhof (2003: 7) defines a test as any vehicle used to obser that attribute, and includes writtemn tests, performance assessment, portfolio systems, and casual observations and questions. A test score is an indication of what is observed through the test and can be quantitative or qualitative i nature.

II. Four Language Skills
In many situations where English is taught for general purposes, the four skills should be carefully integrated and used to perform as many genuinely  communicative tasks as possible. Where this is the case, it is important for the test writer to concentrate on those types of test items which appear directly relevant to the ability to use language for real-life communication, especially in oral interaction.

Thus, questions which test the ability to understand and respond appropriately to polite requests, advice, instructions, etc. would be preferred to tests of reading aloud or telling stories.
In the written section of a test, questions requiring students to write letters, memos, reports and messages would be used in place of many of the more traditional compositions used in the past.

The Four major skills in communicating through language are often broadly defined as listening, speaking, reading and writing. In listening and reading test, questions in which students show their ability to extract specific information of a practical nature would be preferred to questions testing the comprehension of unimportant and irrelevant details. A test of reading now being used to provide the basis for a related test of writing or speaking.

Heaton (1990: 8) describes that ways of assessing performance in the four major skills may take the form of tests of:

1. Listening
Listening (auditory) comprehension, in which short utterances, dialogues, talks and lectures are given to the testees. Listening comprehension is the receptive skill in the oral mode. When we speak of listening what we really mean is listening and understanding what we hear. In our first language, we have all the skills and background knowledge we need to understand what we hear, so we probably aren't even aware of how complex a process it is. Here we will briefly describe some of what is involved in learning to understand what we hear in a second language.

Richards (1983, cited in Omaggio, 1986, p. 126) proposes that the following are the micro-skills involved in understanding what someone says to us. The listener has to:
- retain chunks of language in short-term memory
- discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language
- recognize stress and rhythm patterns, tone patterns,intonational contours.
- recognize reduced forms of words
- distinguish word boundaries
- recognize typical word-order patterns
- recognize vocabulary
- detect key words, such as those identifying topics and ideas
- guess meaning from context
- recognize grammatical word classes
- recognize basic syntactic patterns
- recognize cohesive devices
- detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, -prepositions, and the like.

2. Speaking
Speaking ability,usually in the form of an interview, a picture description, role play- and a problem-solving task involving pair work or group work. Speaking is the productive skill in the oral mode. It, like the other skills, is more complicated than it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words.
Here are some of the micro-skills involved in speaking. The speaker has to:
     
- pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them. This includes making tonal distinctions.
- use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said.
- use the correct forms of words. This may mean, for example, changes in the tense, case, or gender.
- put words together in correct word order.
- use vocabulary appropriately.
- use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversation partner.
- make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.
- make the main ideas stand out from supporting ideas or information.
- make the discourse hang together so that people can follow what you are saying.

3. Reading
Reading comprehension, in which questions are set to test the students' ability to understand the gist of a text and to extract key information on specific points in the text. Reading is the receptive skill in the written mode. It can develop independently of listening and speaking skills, but often develops along with them, especially in societies with a highly-developed literary tradition. Reading can help build vocabulary that helps listening comprehension at the later stages, particularly.
Here are some of the micro-skills involved in reading. The reader has to:
     
- decipher the script. In an alphabetic system or a syllabary, this means establishing a relationship between sounds and symbols. In a pictograph system, it means associating the meaning of the words with written symbols.
- recognize vocabulary.
- pick out key words, such as those identifying topics and main ideas.
- figure out the meaning of the words, including unfamiliar vocabulary, from the (written) context.
- recognize grammatical word classes: noun, adjective, etc.
- detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, etc.
- recognize basic syntactic patterns.
- reconstruct and infer situations, goals and participants.
- use both knowledge of the world and lexical and grammatical cohesive devices to make the foregoing inferences, predict outcomes, and infer links and connections among the parts of the text.
- get the main point or the most important information.
- distinguish the main idea from supporting details.
- adjust reading strategies to different reading purposes, such as skimming for main ideas or studying in-depth.

4. Writing
Writing ability, usually in the form of letters, reports, memos, messages, instructions, and accounts of past events, etc. It is the test constructor's task to assess the relative importance of these skills at the various levels and to devise an accurate means of measuring the student's success in developing these skills. Writing is the productive skill in the written mode. It, too, is more complicated than it seems at first, and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native speakers of a language, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech, but the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

Here are some of the micro-skills involved in writing. The writer needs to:
 - use the orthography correctly, including the script, and spelling and punctuation conventions.
- use the correct forms of words. This may mean using forms that express the right tense, or case or gender.
- put words together in correct word order.
- use vocabulary correctly.
- use the style appropriate to the genre and audience.
- make the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, and object, clear to the reader.
- make the main ideas distinct from supporting ideas or information.
- make the text coherent, so that other people can follow the development of the ideas.
- judge how much background knowledge the audience has on the subject and make clear what it is assumed they don't know.

Tests often play a significant role in the overall assessment of students’ learning. Therefore, as instructors, it essential that we pay particular attention to the manner in which we construct these instruments. Remember to always keep our course goals and learning objectives at the forefront of our mind as we begin to determine what kind of test is the best measure of our students’ learning as the object of the research.

I hope today's posting will be useful for all of us. Amien.

Reference
Richards, Jack C. and Richard Schmidt. 2002. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. London. Pearson Education Limited.

OOsterhof, Albert. 2003. Developing and Using Classroom Assessments. New Jersey:Pearson Education Limited.

Creswell, John W. 2012. Educational Research Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research. Boston: Pearson Education Limited.

Omaggio, A. C. 1986. Teaching Language in Context. Proficiency-oriented Instruction.Boston: Heinle and Heinle.

Heaton, JB. 1990.  Classroom Testing. New York: Longman.

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