Language Theories & Pedagogical Methodologies
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Tests of instruction and education are supposed to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and adequacy of teaching/learning resources (material and human) in relation to the goals and objectives of the instructional or educational system. Language is a highly abstract and complex communication system and does not lend itself to easy analysis. As a result, language theories have been unable to propose universal pedagogical methodologies. This article aims at identifying some of the theoretical and operational problems of TESOL and, to the extent possible, it makes recommendations for teachers and test-designers. It confronts the two major streams of approaches to testing, viz. the analytical and the integrative. The integrative--or synthetic--approach stresses communicative skills as opposed to discrete-point fragmentation of the communicative event. Sociolinguistically and learner-centered, the communicative approach, though laudable in its intent, has failed to develop testing instruments with acceptable reliability. Today, many researchers combine the two approaches, because proficiency is hard to achieve without competency. One of the problems facing the test-designer, in this perspective, is what weight to ascribe to each approach. The apparent antagonism between quantification and qualification renders the predicting of language learning output on the basis of instructional input well-nigh impossible to assess. The communicative approach sees in contextualizatio
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autocratic systems do), then the traditional norm-referencing is the way to go. If, on the other hand, the interest of the actors in the educational event is in the personal growth of the individual, then the student will be compared to himself or herself and to pre-set criteria as the educational process advances, i.e. one will be concerned with criterion-referenced testing, with assessing to what degree the learner has reached the objectives or goals of the educational or instructional process.
One warning worth heeding too is that "There is little if any reason to assume that conclusions from research with native speakers can validly be generalised to the case of non-native speakers" (Oller, 1973:107). This is one of the problems with EFL: much of the experience teachers and testers have had teaching English to native speakers is not transferable to EFL. Oller (1973:109) reported that "with non-native speakers the method of allowing any contextually acceptable response is significantly superior to the exact word scoring technique." He remarks that replacing words in the cloze or other like tests requires insights which may not be language skills at all. Doubtlessly, most such tests sin along the same lines as do standard intel
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Oller Jr, Canale Swain, EFL Oller, McLuhan Worse, Stubbs Tucker, Norbert Wiener's, Furthermore Mullen, Saussure French, Brain-child Jacobs, Abstract Tests, foreign language, language testing, english language, cloze tests, cloze procedure, cloze test, reading comprehension, language proficiency, reliability validity, york ny, english foreign language, english language proficiency, oxford university press, ed language testing, language york ny,
Approximate Word count = 8398
Approximate Pages = 34 (250 words per page)
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