大学英语四六级写作及其写作教学(1)(2)
2015-06-26 01:02
导读：2.1 Different approaches to language testing “Carroll(1968) provides the following definition of a test: a psychological or education test is a procedure designed to elicit certain behavior from whi
2.1 Different approaches to language testing
“Carroll(1968) provides the following definition of a test: a psychological or education test is a procedure designed to elicit certain behavior from which one can make inferences about certain characteristics of an individual” [3].
Generally speaking, there are three main periods in the development of language testing: pre-scientific testing, psychometric-structuralist testing, communicative language testing (or psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic testing). Accordingly, “there exist four main approaches to language testing: the essay-translation approach, the structuralist approach, the integrative approach, and the communicative approach”[4].
In the pre-scientific stage, people believe that language testing just means checking whether or not students have remembered the knowledge of a language. The essay-translation approach is commonly referred to as the pre-scientific stage of language testing. No special skill or expertise in testing is required: the subjective judgment of the teacher is considered to be of paramount importance. Tests usually consist of essay writing, translation, and grammatical analysis. The test also have a heavy literary and cultural bias[5].
In 1900s, the structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology occupied the leading position. Structural linguistics believes that language is a system of speech sounds, arbitrarily assigned to the objects, stated and referred for human communication. The theory of behaviorist psychology is also called S-R theory. It is characterized by emphasis on externally observable response(R) to specific stimuli(S). Behaviorist sees language as a series of learned response to stimuli. Under the influence of the structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology, the psychometric-structuralist testing and the structuralist approach come into being. This approach is characterized by the view that language learning is chiefly concerned with the systematic acquisition of a set of habits. It draws on the work of structural linguistics, especially the importance of contrastive analysis and the need to identify and measure the learner’s mastery of the discrete elements of the target language : phonology, vocabulary and grammar. The skill of listening, speak, reading, and writing are also separated from each other as much as possible because it is considered essential to test one thing at a time. As a result, the need for statistical measures of reliability and validity is considered to be of the utmost importance: hence the popularity of the discrete point testing. Discrete point testing refers to the testing of one element at one time, item by item. Multiple choice is the typical example of it . However, discrete point testing neglects the context and discourse. In the 1970s, people who believe in the unitary competence hypothesis(UCH) advocate the integrative approach .This approach involves the testing of language in context and is thus concerned primarily with meaning and the total communicative effect of discourse. Thus, integrative tests are concerned with a global view of proficiency and are often designed to assess the learner’s ability to use two or more skills simultaneously. Integrative tests are best characterized by the use of cloze testing and of dictation [6] as well as writing composition, making notes while listening to a lecture, etc. Nowadays, the communicative language testing becomes more and more important and popular. Testing means not communicative testing of language but the testing of communicative language. Communicative tests are concerned primarily with how language is used in communication. It aims to incorporate tasks which approximate as closely as possible to those facing the students in real life. Success is judged in terms of the effectiveness of the communication which takes place rather than formal linguistic accuracy [7]. 2.2 Relationship between testing and teaching Both language testing and language teaching are based on linguistics and psychology. They followed the disciplinary trends in linguistic and psychological theories. Both testing and teaching are so closely interrelated that it is virtually impossible to work in either field without being constantly concerned with the other. The proper relationship between testing and teaching is that of partnership. Tests may be constructed primarily as devices to reinforce learning and to motivate the students or primarily as a means of assessing the students’ performance in the language. Standardized tests and public examinations, in fact, may exert such a considerable
