Test as a specific means of control

Means of control are specially designed control tasks, which include an instruction for performing them and the language and speech material under study. The necessary requirements to these tasks are:

- an instruction has to induce students to realise the very habits and skills that are being tested;

- speech and language material of the tasks has to embrace all input the acquisition of which is being checked.

In other words, means of control should be adequate to the object of control. We have already discussed a considerable number of both written and oral means of control without making any attempt to classify them. Yet, in most aspects, the classification of means of control would coincide with the classification of forms of control. If a teacher says that he is going to administer written interim monolingual control for checking writing skill, we will not clearly understand only one thing: what actually will his students have to do?

According to the kind of students’ activity in performing control tasks, all means of control can be divided into traditional (printed or teacher-made) non-test control tasksand tests in all their variety. Traditional means of control include written and oral composition, exposition, dictation, quiz, test paper, or any kind of training activity the results of which are assessed.

Language test is understood as a complex of control tasks designed in accordance with definite requirements, which has been previously applied in order to find out its quality characteristics, and which allows for revealing the degree of language and communicative competence the candidates possess, and elicits results which can be measured with the help of previously established criteria (Kokkota, 1989).

Language tests as a specific means of control have a number of advantages:

1. The quality of tasks is much higher thanks to their previous approbation.

2. They are more reliable due to selective character of candidates’ answers and to performing a greater amount of tasks in the same time.

3. The relative objectiveness of the whole language test and its objective scoring.

4. Compact written form of the language test, including a great number of tasks, helps save academic time.

5. The possibility to check the candidates answers with the help of computer or special stencils. Language and some of speech tests can be easily translated into a computer language.

6. The testing procedure can be standardised and statistically analysed.

7. Tests are more popular with students as they feel their objective character and do not fear bad luck with picking up a control task.

8. Higher representativity of the test results thanks to the standard procedure of testing.

There is a lot to be said for tests as a means of control. Nevertheless they have one disadvantage that might as well overweigh all their positive qualities. There is one kind of speech activity that cannot be assessed with the help of a test: it is speaking, where the level of a student’s communicative competence is best revealed. The ability to oral communicative output can only be tested orally, and it surely will take a lot of time to create a computer program capable of assessing human speech in all variety of meaning and form.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13