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Resume Material of Practicality and Authenticity

This document discusses two key considerations for language assessment: practicality and authenticity. For practicality, cost, administrator qualifications, and acceptability are important factors. Authenticity refers to how well a test task represents real-world language tasks. Authentic tests use natural language, contextualized items, interesting topics and provide thematic organization. Recent tests have increased authenticity by including speaking and writing components, using real-world reading passages, and sequencing items to form meaningful episodes or stories.

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75 views2 pages

Resume Material of Practicality and Authenticity

This document discusses two key considerations for language assessment: practicality and authenticity. For practicality, cost, administrator qualifications, and acceptability are important factors. Authenticity refers to how well a test task represents real-world language tasks. Authentic tests use natural language, contextualized items, interesting topics and provide thematic organization. Recent tests have increased authenticity by including speaking and writing components, using real-world reading passages, and sequencing items to form meaningful episodes or stories.

Uploaded by

Nila Veranita
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Resume Material Of Practicality And

Authenticity

1. Practicality
An obvious practical consideration when planning evaluation is cost. Some
procedures, such as standardized tests, can be very expensive, and therefore their use is
limited.

Some procedures have demanding administrator qualifications, whereas others require


no special talents or training. For most multiple-choice language tests, examiner
qualifications pose no problems: Language teachers generally possess the qualities needed to
administer such tests.

A special training attribute is acceptability. It can be extremely difficult to implement


decisions based on information collected using procedures that students, their parents, or the
community at large lack confidence in. Acceptability is sometimes called face validity. The
use of the term acceptability, however, because this practical attribute does not share the
technical characteristics associated with other types of validity.

2. Authenticity
Bachman and Palmer (1996) define authenticity as the degree of correspondence of
the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task, and
then suggest an agenda for identifying those target language tasks and for transforming them
into valid test item. They may be contrived or artificial in their attempt to target a
grammatical form or a lexical item. The sequencing of items, that bears no relationship to one
another lacks authenticity. One does not have to look very long to find reading
comprehension passages in proficiency tests that hardly reflect a real-world passage.

In a test, authenticity may be present in the following ways:


 The language in the test is as natural as possible
 Items are contextualized rather than isolated
 Topics and situations are interesting, enjoyable, and humorous.
 Some thematic organization to items is provided, such as through a story line or
episode.
 Tasks represent, or closely approximate, real-world tasks.
The authenticity of test tasks in recent years has increased noticeably. Two or three
decades ago unconnected, boring, contrived items were accepted as a necessary by-product of
testing. Things have changed. It was once assumed that large-scale testing could not stay
within budgetary constraints and include performance of the productive skills, but now many
such tests offer speaking and writing components. Reading passages are selected from real-
world sources that test-takers are likely to have encountered or will encounter some day.
More and more tests offer items that are “episodic,” in that they are sequenced to form
meaningful units, paragraphs, or stories.

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