Language Assessment in Context|| what is Language Testing?||Types of Language Testing

The concepts underlying norm-referenced testing have been fully developed in educational measurement circles for most of the twentieth century, and many language teachers have been exposed to this category of testing. However, the idea of criterion-referenced testing did not surface in educational measurement circles until 1963, when Glaser first mentioned the idea. In brief, a norm-refwenced test (NRT) is designed to measure global language abilities (for instance, overall English language proficiency, academic listening ability, reading comprehension, and so on) Each student’s score on such a test is interpreted relative to the scores of all other students who took the test. Such comparisons are usually done with reference to the concept of the normal distribution (familiarly known as the bell curve). The purpose of an NRT is to spread students out along a continuum of scores so that those with “low” abilities in a general area such as reading comprehension are at one end of the normal distribution, while those with “high” abilities are at the other end (with the bulk of the students falling near the middle). In addition, while students may know the general format of the questions on an NRT (for example, multiple-choice, true-false, dictation, or essay), they will typically not know what specific content or skills will be tested by those questions. In contrast, a criterion-referenced test (CRT) is usually produced to measure well-defined and fairly specific objectives. Often these objectives are specific to a particular course, program, school district, or state. The interpretation of scores on a CRT is considered absolute in the sense that each student’s score is meaningful without reference to the other students’ scores. In other words, a student’s score on a particular objective indicates the percent of the knowledge or skill in that objective that the student has learned. Moreover, the distribution of scores on a CRT need not necessarily be normal. If all the students know 100% of the material on all the objectives, then all the students should receive the same score with no variation at all. The purpose of a CRT is to measure the amount of learning that a student has accomplished on each objective. In most cases, the students would know in advance what types of questions, tasks, and content to expect for each objective because the question content would be implied (if not explicitly stated) in the objectives of the course. #whatislanguagetesting #languagetestingincontext #typesoflanguagetesting #norm-referencedtest #criterionreferencedtest #languagetestingandevaluation #definitionoflanguagrtesting what is Language testing? language Testing in Context types of Lang testing Norm-Referenced Test criterion referenced test language Testing & evaluation introduction of language testing definition of language testing