Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
particular purposes with particular people in particular
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- Testing communication
particular purposes with particular people in particular situations. In other words they are testing the basic driving skill, as does the Ministry of Transport driving test, not whether the driver can actually use the car to get from one place to another quickly and safely and legally—as the Institute of Advanced Motorists test does. Testing communication If ‘knowing a language’ is seen as the ability to communicate in particular sorts of situation, then the assessment will be in terms of setting up simulations of those situations and evaluating how effective the communication is that takes place. Situations are likely to have to be specified in terms of the role and status of the participants. The degree of formality of the interaction, the attitudes and purposes of the participants, the setting or context and the medium of transmission used—spoken or written language. The productive-receptive dimension will also enter in since this is often relevant to the roles of participants. A lecturer does all the talking, his audience only listens; but a customer in a dress shop is likely to be involved in extensive two-way exchanges with the sales assistant. It is of course possible to devise discrete items, objectively scored tests of communicative ability, but it would seem in general that global, subjectively marked tests are more likely to make it possible to match the task on which the assessment is based fairly closely with the actual performance required. The ‘situational composition’ used as a testing device is probably the most familiar example of this, and has been part of the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate’s paper in English Language for East Africa for many years. The sort of thing that is used is exemplified by the following: Assessment and Examinations 155 Write a reply accepting the following formal invitation: Mr and Mrs J.Brown request the pleasure of the company of Mr Alfred Andrews at the wedding of their daughter Sylvia to Mr Alan White on Wednesday 6th April 1977 at 2.00 p.m. in St Martin’s Church, Puddlepool, Wessex and afterwards at the Mount Hotel, Puddlebridge, Wessex. 18 The Crescent R.S.V.P. Puddlepool Wessex. There are however a great many other possibilities and one of the most interesting explorations of what these might be is Keith Morrow’s Techniques of Evaluation for a Notional Syllabus (RSA 1977—mimeo) from which the following examples are taken. Identification of context of situation. Oral—tape recorded presentation written response. Group. Listen carefully. You are about to hear an utterance in English. It will be repeated twice. After you have heard the utterance answer the questions below by writing the letter of the correct reply in the appropriately numbered box on your answer sheet. The utterance will be repeated twice more after two minutes. Person: ‘Excuse me, do you know where the nearest post-office is, please?’ (i) Where might somebody ask you that question? A. In your house B. In your office C. In the street. D. In a restaurant. (ii) What is the person asking you about? A. The price of stamps. B. The age of the post-office. Assessment and Examinations 156 C. The position of the post-office. D. The size of the post-office. etc. Question (i) here relates to the setting of the utterance (ii) to the topic, (iii) would relate to its function (iv) to the speaker’s role. (v) to the degree of formality of the utterance, (vi) to the speaker’s status, and so on, to cover as many different dimensions of the context of situation as may be thought appropriate. Asking questions. Mixed oral/written presentation/ and response. Individual. The examiner is provided with a table of information of the following kind: KINGS OF ENGLAND Came to Name the throne Died Age Reigned William I 1066 1087 60 21 William II 1087 1100 43 13 Henry I 1100 1135 67 35 Stephen 1135 1154 50 19 Candidates are supplied with an identical table with blanks in certain spaces. The task is to complete the table by asking the examiner for specific information. To ensure that the examiner treated each question on its merits a number of different tables would be needed with different blanks at different places for different candidates. The candidates would be assessed on a number of related criteria. First, success. Does the candidate actually manage to fill in the blanks correctly? Second time. How long does it take the candidate to assess the situation and perform as required? Third, productive skill. If he fails to ask any questions, or if his question is unlikely to be understood by the average native speaker of English: no marks. If the question is comprehensible but unnatural: 1 mark. If the question is appropriate, accurate and well expressed: Assessment and Examinations 157 4 marks. Candidates may be scaled between the extremes by using as principal criterion how far the candidate’s faults interfere with his ability to cope with the situation. Clearly test items of this kind can have an almost limitless range of variation, what has here been exemplified as oral presentation could be purely written, information which is here exemplified as being presented in tabular form could just as well be presented pictorially—sets of pictures of the ‘Spot the difference’ kind for example, and it is not unlikely that a good deal of exciting experimentation in this field will take place in the next few years. In the last resort most formal assessment of English as a foreign language nowadays is a combination of elements from a wide range of all the different kinds of test discussed above, probably reflecting some kind of consensus view that language does involve code, system, skill and communication. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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