Reconceptualizing language teaching: an in-service teacher education course in uzbekistan

Reliability. A reliable assessment tool generates consistent results even 
if administered on several occasions. However, several factors must be tak-
en into consideration when judging the reliability of a certain test. Brown 
and Abeywickrama (2010) highlight the main four: students, the scoring, 
the test administration and the assessment tool. It is possible that the same 
student can perform differently from a previous time due to physical (e.g. 
fatigue, illness) or psychological (e.g. stress) conditions (p. 27-28). There are 
also issues such as inter-rater and intra-rater reliability (these will be dis-
cussed in more detail in Section 3.4). Sufficient attention should be paid to 
develop reliability in terms of discrepancy in different raters’ marking and 
the consistency of the same rater across students. 
Impact. It is undeniable that any kind of assessment has a certain 
impact. This is also referred as washback or, sometimes in the literature as 
backwash
. Such impact can be intentional or unintentional. McNamara 
(2000) differentiates washback from impact by referring to the formers as 
“the influence that testing has on teaching” and the latter as “the effect of a 
test beyond the classroom, the ripples or waves it makes in the wider edu-
cational and social world” (p. 72). Overall, washback can be positive or neg-
ative, narrow or broad, intended or unintended. Washback happens more 
with high stakes-tests than low-stakes tests.
Practicality. An assessment tool can be considered practical if it uses 
fits an available budget, does not exceed the optimal time constraints and 
easy in administration as well as scoring. In other words, a practical test 
is well-considered logistically. Therefore, departments responsible for hun-

---

116
RECONCEPTUALIZING LANGUAGE TEACHING
dreds of students should make thorough considerations in planning such 
assessments.