The Way To Test Each Skills In English

How To Test Each Skills In English...???

1. How to test reading

          In testing reading, teacher should consider several things such as method and techniques, setting tasks to measure students’ reading ability, and assessing students’ reading fluency. These three main points can be described as follows:

Method and Technique

Contextual Teaching Learning (CTL) is commonly used in teaching reading and techniques are used are scanning and skimming. Other techniques are:

·      Multiple choice The testees provide evidence of successful reading by making a mark against one out of a number of alternatives.

·     Unique answer Here there is only one possible correct answer. This might be a single word or number, or something slightly longer.

·         Short answer When unique answer items are not possible, short answer may be used.

·       Summary cloze A reading passage is summarized by the tester and then gaps are left in the summary for completion by the testees.

Setting tasks

·    Selecting text, types of text might include textbook, novel, magazine, newspaper, academic journal, letter, poem, etc. However, teacher must be selective in determine text that will be given to students. Also it may often be appropriate if the topic is discussing general terms.

·         Do not use text which students have already read.

·         Choose text which will interest testees.

Assessing Students’ Reading Fluency

       Assessing Reading Fluency is intended to assist practitioners in monitoring students’ fluency development. Assessments are discussed in terms of three components of fluency:

·         Accuracy, or accurate decoding of words in text,

·         Automaticity, or decoding words with minimal use of attentional resources,

·         Prosody, or the appropriate use of phrasing and expression to convey meaning.

        Fluency assessments must have some degree of reliability and validity. Teacher who uses the assessments must be assured that the results they obtain are reliable, that the results will provide consistent measures of fluency and will not vary because of imperfections in the assessment itself. Teacher must also be assured that the assessments are valid, that they actually measure reading fluency.

         In summary, reading fluency is more than reading fast: it is reading at an appropriately fast rate with good expression and phrasing that reflects solid understanding of the passage.

Scoring Reading Test

            Reading is one of receptive skill besides listening, so that the scoring of reading test uses rubric scoring.

2. How to test speaking

        Speaking is "the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts" (Chaney, 1998, p. 13). Speaking is a crucial part of second language learning and teaching. In teaching speaking, here they are the method and techniques can be used to measure students’ ability;

Method: Total Physical Response Method (TPR)

      Teacher who use the TPR method believe in the importance of having their students enjoy their experience in learning to communicate in a foreign language. This method was developed in order to reduce the stress people feel when studying foreign language and thereby encourage students to persist in their study beyond a beginning level proficiency.

Possible Techniques to Measure Students’ Speaking Ability:

·             Discussion, students may determine group by themselves and should be rearranged in every discussion activity so that students can work with various people and learn to be open to different ideas. Whatever the aim is, the students should always be encouraged to ask questions, paraphrase ideas, express support, check for clarification, and so on.

·                         Role play, one other way of getting students to speak is role-playing. Students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles. In role-play activities, the teacher gives information to the learners such as who they are and what they think or feel.

a.       Interviews, students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides a rubric to students so that they know what type of questions they can ask or what path to follow, but students should prepare their own interview questions.

b.      Picture describing, teacher gives students picture and having them to describe what it is in it. This activity fosters the students’ creativity and imagination as well as their public speaking skills.

c.    Debate, this technique quite effective to make students more communicative and force them express their vocabulary, grammar, good pronunciation while they have to debate their ideas.

Scoring the Speaking Test

          The scoring of oral ability is highly subjective, because speaking or oral ability has some features such as accent, grammar, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The accurate measurement of this skill is not easy. It takes considerable time and effort to obtain valid and reliable result.

3. How to test writing

Writing test items is a matter of precision, perhaps more akin to computer programming than to writing prose. A test item must focus the attention of the examinee on the principle or construct upon which the item is based. Ideally, students who answer a test item incorrectly will do so because their mastery of the principle or construct in focus was inadequate or incomplete. Any characteristics of a test item which distract the examinee from the major point or focus of the item, reduces the effectiveness of that item. Any item answered correctly or incorrectly because of extraneous factors in the item, results in misleading feedback to both examinee and examiner.

Writing test is a paper -based assessment. Writing test assesses writing skills and knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. The candidate is given a short text, such as an email, letter extract, memo or advert, and guidelines for writing a reply or follow-up email, message or letter.

The Writing test assesses writing skills in relation to the workplace. The test is evaluated by two trained language specialists against set criteria. For example:

·            accuracy and appropriateness of language use

·            organization of ideas

·            How effectively the piece of writing achieves its purpose.

The test that used in writing test is subjective test, for instant:

·            completion

·            essay

·            writing letter

4. How to test listening

        Listening is considered as the one of the most important part of the oral communication. The term is used in order to make oral communication effective. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding. Testing listening involves a variety of skills.

Ø  Macro skills of listening, might include:

·         Listening for specific information

·         Obtaining gist of what is being said

·         Following directions

·         Following instructions

Ø  Micro skills of listening, might include:

·         Interpretation of intonation patterns

·         Recognition of function of structures

          At the lowest level, it involves discrimination among sounds, discrimination among intonation and stress patterns, and comprehension of short and long listening texts. Types of test which is appropriate is objective test such as multiple-choice, matching, true and false, error analysis items, sentence rearrangement, and completion test.

Method which is used in Listening:

·   Audio-lingual Method

·   Contextual Teaching Learning (CTL)

Possible Techniques for Testing Listening

·         Testing Phoneme Discrimination

            This type of discrimination item is one that can be used for diagnostic purposes to see whether students have particular problems with distinguishing between phonemes.

·         Discriminating Stress and Intonation

     The ability to recognize stress can be tested by having testees listen to a sentence that they also have in front of them. Testees are instructed to indicate the word that carries the main stress of the sentence. For example in sentences “John is going today” and “John is going today”

    Ability to understand the meaning of difference in intonation can be tested by having the testees listen to a statement and choose from three interpretations of the statement. For example, testees might be given the statement "Ryan is a wonderful musician" and be asked to decide whether the speaker is making a straightforward statement, a sarcastic statement, or a question.

·         Tasks Involving Talks and Lectures

The way of doing this involves giving testees questions to answer as they listen to the talk. Testees can be allowed to take notes while listening to the talk and then use the notes to answer questions after the talk is over. Depending on the length and complexity of the talk, testees might be given a list of the major topics included in the talk in order to help them in taking notes.

Scoring the Listening Test

     It is probably worth to mention that in scoring a test of receptive skill there is no reason to deduct points for errors of grammar or spelling, provided that it is clear that the correct response was intended. Typically, assessment efforts are divided into two types, formative or summative.