Kinds of tests

There are many kinds of tests, each with a specific purpose, a particular criterion to be measured.

Proficiency Tests

If your aim in a test is to tap global competence in a language, then you are, in conventional terminology, testing proficiency. A proficiency test is not intended to be limited to any one course, curriculum, or single skill in the language. Proficiency tests have traditionally consisted of standardized multi­ple-choice items on grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, aural comprehension, and sometimes of a sample of writing.

A rather typical example of a standardized proficiency test is the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) produced by the Educational Testing Service. It is used by nearly 1000 institutions of higher education in the United States as an indicator of a prospective student's ability to undertake academic work in an English medium. The TOEFL consists of the following three sec­tions:

Section 1, Listening Comprehension, measures the ability to understand English as it is spoken in the United States. The oral aspects of the language are stressed. The problems tested include vocabulary that is more frequently used in spoken English, structures that are primarily peculiar to spoken English, and sound and intonation distinctions that have proven to be difficult for nonnative speakers. The stimulus material is recorded in standard American English; the response options are printed in the test books.

Section 2, Structure and Written Expression, measures mastery of important structural and grammatical points in standard written English. The language tested is formal, rather than conversational. The topics of the sentences are of a general academic nature so that individuals in specific fields of study or from specific national or linguistic groups have no particular advantage. When topics have a national context, they refer to United States history, culture, art, or litera­ture.

Section 3, Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension, tests the ability to under­stand the meanings and uses of words in written English as well as the ability to understand a variety of reading materials. So that there is no advantage to indi­viduals in any one field of study, the questions based on reading materials do not require outside knowledge of the subject matter.

Proficiency tests sometimes add sections that involve free writing (e.g., ETS's Test of Written English) and/or oral production (e.g., ETS's Test of Spoken English), but these responses diminish the practicality of scoring on a high-volume basis. The TOEFL and virtually every other large-scale proficiency test is machine scorable; when scorers must either read writing samples or judge audiotapes of spoken proficiency, a great deal of administrative cost and time are involved.

Diagnostic and Placement Tests

A diagnostic test is designed to diagnose a particular aspect of a particular language. A diagnostic test in pronunciation might have the purpose of deter­mining which particular phonological features of the language pose difficulty for a learner. Prator's (1972) Diagnostic Passage, for example, is a short written passage that a student of English as a second language reads orally; the teacher or tester then examines a tape recording of that reading against a very detailed checklist of pronunciation errors. The checklist serves to diagnose certain problems in pronunciation. Some proficiency tests can serve as diagnostic tests by isolating and analyzing certain sets of items within the test. An achievement test on a particular module in a curriculum might include a num­ber of items on modal auxiliaries; these particular items could serve to diag­nose difficulty on modals.

Certain proficiency tests and diagnostic tests can act in the role of place­ment tests whose purpose is to place a student in a particular level or section of a language curriculum or school. A placement test typically includes a sam­pling of material to be covered in the curriculum (that is, it has content valid­ity), and it thereby provides an indication of the point at which the student will find a level or class to be neither too easy nor too difficult but to be appro­priately challenging.

Achievement Tests

An achievement test is related directly to classroom lessons, units, or even a total curriculum. Achievement tests are limited to particular material covered in a curriculum within a particular time frame.

Aptitude Tests

Finally, we need to consider the type of test that is given to a person prior to any exposure to the second language, a test that predicts a person's future success. A foreign language aptitude test is designed to measure a person's capacity or general ability to learn a foreign language and to be successful in that undertaking. Aptitude tests are considered to be independent of a par­ticular foreign language, predicting success in the acquisition of any foreign language. Two standardized aptitude tests have been used in the United States—the Modern Language Aptitude Test (Carroll and Sapon 1958) and the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (Pimsleur 1966). Both of these are English language tests and require students to perform such tasks as learning numbers, listening, detecting spelling clues and grammatical patterns, and memorizing.

The importance of these four different kinds of language tests lies in the fact that different tests serve different purposes. In order to select tests ade­quately and to interpret their results accurately, teachers need to be aware of the ultimate purpose of the testing context.

Within each category of test above there is a variety of different possible techniques and procedures. These range from objective to subjective tech­niques, open-ended to structured, multiple-choice to fill-in-the-blank, written to oral. Moreover, language has been viewed traditionally as consisting of four separate skills; therefore language tests have attempted to measure differential ability in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is not uncommon to be quite proficient in reading a foreign language but not in speaking, or of course for aural comprehension to outstrip speaking ability.

Beyond such considerations, tests of each of the modes of performance can be focused on a continuum of linguistic units, from smaller to larger: phonology and orthography, words, sentences, and discourse. In interpreting a test it is important to note which linguistic units are being tested. Oral produc­tion tests can be tests of overall conversational fluency or pronunciation of a particular subset of phonology, and can take the form of imitation, structured responses, or free responses. Similarly, listening-comprehension tests can con­centrate on a particular feature of language or on overall listening for general meaning. Tests of reading can cover the range of language units and can aim to test comprehension of long or short passages, single sentences, or even phrases and words. Writing tests can take on an open-ended form with free composition, or be structured to elicit anything from correct spelling to discourse-level competence.