Consolidation

15.3.3. Washback effect of tests

A test can have a positive or a negative WASHBACK EFFECTon teaching and learning. It is pos-itive if the aims of the course and the testing are the same: similar tasks can be found both in the exam and during the language course. It is negative, however, if it is testing that deter-mines the content of the course. It happens if tasks different from the ones that are in the exam are not dealt with during the course at all. In this case, students do not learn the lan-guage but rather they prepare for the exam. If you learn a foreign lanlan-guage according to the communicative approach, you should not change your learning methods just because you have to take an examination.

15.3.4. A standard model of developing a good test

Think of the “érettségi” test you had to complete not a long time ago. Both the content and the layout seemed quite professional, did it not? No wonder, as it must have caused a hard time for the testers to make the test look and be so masterly. A test, mainly if it is a high-stakes test like the “érettségi”, has to be compiled in a rigorous way, which, in a nutshell, goes like the following:

First the test questions (TEST ITEMS) have to be written by somebody who knows how to write good items (TESTERS). After that this item-writer has to show other item-writers what s/he wrote and they have to discuss how acceptable those items are. If there are some wrong items, they must be changed. In the next phase the test must be tested (PILOT PHASE) – some students should complete the proposed test. These students cannot be the ones we want to test. The results have to be statistically analysed. If there are some items which do not test students’ competence well enough, they have to be changed. After that the test has to be for-matted and students can complete that. Then the tests have to be evaluated. Also, the pass-mark has to be set, which means that you have to state what the minimum score is students have to achieve so as not to fail the test.

Points to Ponder

1. Think about your language learning experience. What teaching methods did your previous teachers apply? Which did you prefer? Why?

2. Can you state that a test containing only grammar items does not test what it should?

Why?

3. Why do they say that a test can be reliable without being valid, but it cannot be valid without being reliable?

4. Ask some of your group-mates to complete the reading tasks in two different inter-mediate language examinations. Compare their results. If there are big differences be-tween their results, why do you think this could happen? If their results are very similar, what does it tell you about the tests?

5. Compare the advanced-level final examination and an accredited examination with each other. Do you think there is a difference between what the developers of these tests think of language knowledge?

Suggested Reading

Alderson, J. C., Clapham, C. and Wall, D. (1995). Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Perhaps the best and most readable introduction to how a language test should be cre-ated, tried out, administered and evaluated. Highly recommended for anybody want-ing to have easy access to the tricks of language testwant-ing.

Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing.

Oxford University Press: Oxford.

In this book you can learn about a communicative competence model, which is called communicative language ability, and also about the basic notions of language testing.

Bachman, L. F. and Cohen, A. D. (eds.) (1998). Interfaces Between Second Language Acqui-sition and Language Testing Research. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

This book is for readers interested in both second language acquisition research and the latest issues in language testing and also how these two seemingly distant areas are connected to each other.

Brown, H. D. (1987). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.

Prentice Hall: New Jersey.

One of the best introductory books to language teaching for would-be language teach-ers. It discusses the theoretical background to language teaching, gives ideas how the four skills should be taught effectively and also talks about planning and managing language classes.

Suggested Reading

Stern, H. H. (1983). Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching.

Oxford University Press: Oxford.

A classic book on the theoretical and historical background to language teaching.

The chapters of the book are the following: Clearing the Ground, Historical Perspec-tives, Concepts of Language, Concepts of Society, Concepts of Language Learning, and Concepts of Language Teaching.

t happens frequently that when I meet people for the first time, the conversation comes round to what languages I speak, where I learnt them, and what my mother tongue is.

Sometimes this happens because my first name is strange to English ears, sometimes be-cause I speak German with an accent, and sometimes bebe-cause when I speak Hungarian, it sounds a little unusual in some way. Although I don’t mind answering these questions, the answers are never easy. Perhaps the best answer to what my native language is, is that I am bilingual, since I learnt Hungarian and English very nearly at the same time. Yet I speak, and certainly read and write, English better. As to whether I am bilingual in German, a language I learnt in my thirties? The answer to that can only be “It depends”. What it

depends on, forms part of the content of this chapter.

16.1. What about you?

As you start to read this chapter, think about what you are doing. You are probably a Hun-garian who has been learning English as a foreign language for some years. Perhaps you have been able to spend some time in an English-speaking country. Certainly you like English enough to want to continue studying it. But are you a bilingual? Do you yourself call your-self a bilingual? How well does someone have to be able to speak more than one language in order to be termed a bilingual? Is this term reserved for people who speak two languages equally well? Or do you think being bilingual has more to do with growing up speaking two languages?

16.2. Mother tongue plus one (or more)

What can be said is that any person who is bilingual by one of these definitions is proficient to some degree, and uses in some way, a language other than his mother tongue, or native lan-guage, or first lanlan-guage, or dominant language– as you can see, even this basic term mother tongue is full of pitfalls when we move out of everyday language use and try to define it for purposes of study. What is your mother tongue? The language of your mother, almost cer-tainly. What, however, if the language spoken by your mother is not the language of your father? Or of the community you live in? What if you only speak your mother’s language to her, and speak another language at school, where you learn to read and write that language on a much higher level? What is then your mother tongue?

Borbála Richter

Kodolányi János University College Department of English Language and Literature