Learn to Be Competent in Language Testing

In order to be a better test developer or be able to choose a satisfactory test, one must have the notion of what a useful test is, namely, the usefulness of a test. According to Bachman and Palmer, the usefulness of a test is the most important quality of a test because it is the essential basis for quality control throughout the entire test development process. Test usefulness includes six test qualities----reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact and practicality. (1996:37). Reliability is consistency of measurement. A reliable test score will be consistent across different characteristics of the testing situation. If test scores are not relatively consistent, they provide us with no information about the ability we want to measure. Since we recognize that it is impossible to eliminate inconsistencies entirely, we therefore try to minimize variations in the test task characteristics that do not correspond to variations in target language use tasks (TLU tasks). Construct validity referred to the extent to which people can interpret a given test score as an indicator of the ability (ies), or construct(s) people want to measure.  However, test validation is an on-going process and that the interpretations we make of test scores can never be considered absolutely valid.  Authenticity is defined as the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a TLU task. It relates the test task to the domain of generalization to which we want our score interpretations to generalize.  It has potential effect on test taker’s perceptions of the test and on their performance.  Interactiveness is the extent and type of involvement of the test taker’s individual characteristics in accomplishing a test task.  It is at the heart of many current views of language teaching and language learning.  Impact can be defined broadly in terms of the various ways in which test use affects society, an education system, and the individuals within these.  It operates at a macro level in terms of the societal of educational system in general and as well as a micro level in terms of the individuals who are affected by the particular test use. Finally, practicality is the relationship between the resources that will be required in design, development, and use of the test and the resources that will be available for these activities. Since these six qualities all contribute to test usefulness, they cannot be evaluated independently of each other.  Furthermore, the relative importance of these different qualities will vary from one testing situation to another, so that test usefulness can only be evaluated for specific testing situations. In designing and developing a test, we try to achieve the best balance among the six qualities for particular testing situation.  In addition, we must determine the resources required to achieve this balance in relationship to the resources that are available.

As testing plays an important role and test designing requires taking many aspects into consideration, we teachers cannot neglect the importance of enabling ourselves to be good test users and then good test designers so as to make teaching more effective and help students learn better.

Bibliography

Bachman, L.F.Palmer A.S.1996. Language Testing in Practice. 上海外语教育出版社

萧春麟，刘清华，《英语测试教程》，上海交通大学出版社

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