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Table 15. Test formats according to the language skills 
Language Skills 
Test Formats 

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Reading skills 
1. Multiple-choice items 
2. Short answers test 
3. Cloze test 
4. Gap-filling tests 
5. Matching 
6. Rearrangement 
7. False/true statement 
8. Completion 
Listening skills 
1. Multiple-choice items 
2. False/true statements 
3. Gap-filling tests 
4. Dictations 
5. Listening recall 
6. Rearrangement 
7. Matching 
Writing skills 
1. Dictations 
2. Compositions 
3. Reproductions 
4. Writing stories 
5. Writing diaries 
6. Filling-in forms 
7. Word formation 
8. Sentence transformation 
Speaking skills 
1. Retelling stories 
2. Describing pictures 
3. Describing people 
4. Spotting the differences 
5. Interview 
 
The created tests must be evaluated via certain criteria. There 
are a lot of evaluation criteria. Test qualities include among others 
reliability, validity, consistency and practicality.
Methodologists (Alderson, Clapham & Wall, 1996:286; 
Bachman & Palmer, 1997:19-42) explain these criteria as: 
- Reliability is permanence of the measurement results 
produced by a test. Testing productive skills such as speaking and 
creative writing is less reliable than testing listening and reading. 

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E.g., there is always more room for subjectivity in assessing an 
essay than a dictation. “Reliability” is the opposite to “randomness” 
in the marking given by the teachers or examiners.
- Consistency is agreement between parts of the test. All the 
tasks in a consistent test have the same level of difficulty for the 
learners. Some tests are more difficult to make consistent than 
others, e.g. a dictation will contain the words with a different level 
of difficulty for spelling. 
- Construct validity pertains to whether the text measures what 
it claims to measure. If a test claims to measure such “construct” as 
“oral” skill, then a valid test should measure exactly an “oral skill” 
but not other “constructs” such as the “knowledge of grammar”.
- Concurrent validity is the coincidence of the test scores with 
other measures of the learner’s language performance, e.g. 
teacher’s.
- Practicality is the degree to which a test can be used as a 
convenient tool for measuring language performance. If a test needs 
much preparation time, or requires too long time in the lesson, it 
will be perceived as “impractical”.