Testing of Grammar (By David P. Harris)
Testing of Grammar
(Summarized from Testing english as a second
Language By David P. Harris)
General nature of the ESL structure test
There is an essential difference between the
traditional “grammar” test for the native speaker of English and the kind
structure test appropriate for the foreign learner. The grammar test in the
native speaker usually concentrated on matters of style and diction appropriate
for rather formal written English, while structure test for foreign language
student will have as their purpose of the testing control of the basic
grammatical patterns of the spoken language (David P. Harris).
Determination of test content
The preparation of a structure test should
always begin with the setting up of a detailed outline of the proposed test
content. This outline may have to be modified on the basis of the result of
pretesting, but must be taken to ensure that the final form of the test
includes a broad range of relevant grammatical problems in proportions which
reflect their relative importance. As a rule, the test should include the full
range of structure that were taught in the course, and each structural type
should receive about the same emphasis in the test that it received in the
classroom.
Item types
1. Completion
(multiple-choice), the most common type of multiple-choice structure item
presents a context in which one or more words are missing, followed by several
alternative completions.
2. Sentence
alternative (multiple-choice). Another item types does away with the item stem
altogether and simply presents several sentences from which the examinee
chooses the acceptable version.
3. Sentence
interpretation (multiple-choice). A third type of structure item presents a
stimulus and then asks for an interpretation. This becomes a kind of reading
comprehension task in which the crucial clues are structural.
4. Scrambled
sentence (multiple-choice). Scrambled sentence is the test device in which the
examinee rearranges a jumbled series of elements so as to form an acceptable
sentence. This device has some good for an elementary level. On a more advance
level, however, this item types has several drawback. First, it is difficult to
compose items of just the right level or difficulty. Secondly, it is hard to
avoid scrambled word groups that cannot be assembled in a variety of acceptable
ways, making the scoring time-consuming when large number of papers are
involved. But anything is really accomplished by this device that cannot be
effectively and economically achieved by other methods.
5. Completion
(supply type). This item type is extremely useful in informal classroom-testing
situations. This device is easier to prepare than the multiple-choice types,
and it requires a certain amount of composition on the part of the students. On
the other hand, the disadvantage of this device is it needs much more
time-consuming to score, and it may have several possible correct answers so
that the scores might judge the same response differently.
6. Conversion
(supply type). Another type of short-answer structure test requires the
examinees to convert or transform a series of sentence in a specified manner.
Advice on item writing
The completion item types are the most common
ways of testing structure objectively, we have to concentrate our attention on
the problems of writing these items, using dialogue form for our example. Here
are the principles:
1. The
language of the dialogue should read like spoken English
2. The
second part of the dialogue should sound like a natural response to the first
part
3. All
distracters should be definitely non-English
4. No
distracters should include “errors” which would appear in writing but not in
speech