英语测试学复习题

基础英语测试学复习题

（一）英语测试的发展阶段

1 Pre-scientific stage

This stage refers to the period that lasted to 1950s. At that time the foreign language teaching put emphasis on the written form rather than on the communicative aspect of the language. No special skill or expertise in testing was required: the subjective judgment of the teacher was considered to be of paramount importance. Test usually consisted of essay writing, translation, grammatical analysis and sometimes oral tests. Spolsky calls the traditional approach pre-scientific because it paid no attention to such matters as reliability and objectivity and didn’t use statistical methods.

2 Psychometric--structure stage

The dominant testing form in the 1950s and 1960s was psychometric--structural approach. American linguist, Robert Lado, one of the first testing scholar, stressed on two points with an aim to establish an objective aspect of measuring human language proficiency: First, test should test language usages and not knowledge about language. Second, the structures to be tested should be valid structures in colloquial language use. The structural sentence-based view of language fitted in quite well with the psychometric quest for samples of individual elements to be tested. This resulted in standardized tests with an emphasis on discrete point items, which can be further divided into subtests. The tests are characterized by the conviction that testing can be objective, precise, reliable and scientific. The multiple-choice format was regarded as a satisfactory instrument in measuring the proficiency in the comprehension of written English.

3 Psycholinguistic—sociolinguistic stage

This stage is a period that covers the 1960s and 1970s when Noam Chomsky’s linguistics theory swayed the basis of structuralism. This involves the testing of language in context and is thus concerned primarily with meaning and the total communicative effect of the discourse. As early as 1961, John B. Carroll emphasized that, in addition to discrete point tests, integrative tests should be used, these are tests which are not so much aimed at testing separate elements but measuring the total communicative effect of an utterance. The integrative test does not seek to separate the language skills into neat divisions to improve test reliability; instead, they are often designed to assess the learner’s ability to use two or more skills simultaneously. Integrative test is best characterized by the use of close testing and of dictation. Oral interview, translation and essay writing are also included in integrative tests.

4 Communicative pragmatic stage

The communicative pragmatic period began to occur corresponding with the global shift since 1970s to the communicative aspect of language in the international educational circle. The rise of the sociolinguistics has brought about a shift to the interest from linguistic competence to communicative competence. The communicative test aims to measure candidates’ communicative competency. Communicative competency is associated not only with the linguistic competence, but also with the communicative competence. The communicative test is characterized by