Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 25/53)

First of all, the oral tests used at this institution have been formally administered at the end of each term in order to measure what the students have actually achieved after one particular time of learning. Such kind of test is called a final achievement test by Hughes (1989) and McNamara (2000), progress and grading test by Bachman&Palmer (1996), course test by Davies (2000), or final or attainment test by Heaton (1990). All the teachers or test writers as well as assessors have always known that they should elicit the students’ actual ability to use the language in real communication, and especially their language knowledge and ability they are required to grasp by the end of one particular term. Therefore, oral tests at this institution are explicitly identified as achievement ones from the very start, and both the teachers and the assessors have been aware of this.

However, neither the Department nor the English Section has produced a formal document including explicit classification of students’ language proficiency levels, particular areas of language ability or construct to be assessed and sets of TLU tasks identified for all the levels. Also, they have not established any criteria for test quality evaluation.

Secondly, as regards the operationalization process, the test designers have not kept in hand the official document mentioned above with descriptions of different levels of language proficiency in terms of the students’ language knowledge, i.e. a level scale (discussed in 2.3.1) and with areas of language ability to be tested. Additionally, the teachers or test writers have not received any detailed guidelines or instructions on number of test tasks included in the test(s) as well as test task specifications. Nevertheless, they have been informed about the administration time of the test(s) in advance in order to ensure punctual test production and submission.

Therefore, the teachers or test designers have freely produced the speaking tests in their own way, and most of the oral tests conducted make use of merely one oral test type – Tests where the learner prepares in advance – and one elicitation technique – oral report – and consist of one test task/part (See Appendix 1- these three tests were used for the same class for three terms in succession). Furthermore, as shown in these three tests, none of the test task/question is attached with neither external prompts helping the students make a structured presentation nor explicit instructions quantifying language knowledge and ability needed to perform the task.

Thirdly, concerning the administration process, there has been no detailed guidance in the form of either a meeting among the group of administrators and assessors or an official document regarding the students’ language proficiency level, i.e. level scale mentioned above, and no guidelines on method(s) of marking students’ performance on each test task. In short, the assessors are never informed of or provided with these two important things before test administration.