Class: 14E5

Group: Pham Nguyen Ha My, Nguyen Thi Thu Hang

LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT ASSIGNMENT 1

EVALUATION OF A FINAL ACHIEVEMENT TEST

The current test is a final achievement test named Paper test for second semester 2014-2015, published by Binh Phuoc
Education and Training Department High School in May 2015. It measures the depth of tenth grade students knowledge
about different language components learnt from unit 1 to unit 10 in Tieng Anh 10 in a year. Its assessment methods will be
examined below, along with the compliance with the course targets and requirements on language assessment for senior
high school students.

The test contains six sections with both selected-response and constructed-response items. In general, their instructions are
concise and explicit, but the second task of the Listening section would be less confusing if there were a word limit for the
fill-in questions. In terms of multiple-choice assessment, the stems are quite well-written with effective control of vocabulary
and sentence structures; for more information, please refer to Appendix A. The alternatives are homogenous and appropriate
to the content of the stems, despite several minor flaws that are also attached in Appendix A, together with other errors in
matching and true-false items. Concerning the techniques of constructed-response assessment, the Writing section is
designed carefully with clear instructions and a familiar topic, but a task of forty-word paragraph seems effortless for
students to perform.

Overall, the test content is appropriate to the educational level of tenth grade students in Vietnam, and reasonably consistent
with the instruction process. Nevertheless, there are several undesirable features worth discussing. In terms of content
validity, based on the course objectives, the test proves to under-represent the learning content in the textbook; for instance,
the course aims to teach four language skills, but the speaking skills are entirely excluded from the assessment, and the
Communication part appears insufficient to measure students communicative competence. For more details, please refer
to part 1 in Appendix B. Besides, the test cannot satisfy the requirements of the Minister of Education and Training to some
degree. Not only are the speaking skills missing, but other sections also lack plenty of essential elements. To illustrate, the
structure of reading comprehension is expected to contain four parts instead of two, and its passages are extracted from
authentic materials such as newspapers or advertisement; additional details on this feature can be found in Appendix B, part
1. With regards to authenticity, the language in the test is not natural and contextualized, let alone the stems for two reading
passages are lifted directly from the textbook. This supports the assumption that the required cognitive level for reading
skills is knowledge rather than comprehension and, therefore, the test fails to both replicate the real-life tasks or materials
and require the candidate to perform precisely the skills that need measuring. Moreover, albeit having a high level of
practicality, a sixty-minute test with a full coverage of what students have learnt in a year seems highly demanding; please
see part 2 in Appendix B for further information.

In conclusion, the test is relatively well-designed regarding techniques of test items. However, there is some room for
improvement for several qualities to achieve the course objectives and requirements of the Minister of Education and Training,
as well as to avoid harmful backwash effects on the teaching and learning process.

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