有效的外语教学与评估手段(1)(2)
2015-09-11 01:07
导读：“Spolsky identifies three stages in the recent history of language testing: the pre-scientific, the psychometric-structuralist, and the psycho-socio-linguistic.”[1] Critics of the “pre- scientif
“Spolsky identifies three stages in the recent history of language testing: the pre-scientific, the psychometric-structuralist, and the psycho-socio-linguistic.”[1] Critics of the “pre- scientific” approach to testing are already familiar, since language testing during this stage is thought of as testing the students' reception of language knowledge, which has a very low degree of reliability and validity. During the second stage, language is regarded as a series of structure form, symbolic system, and the learning of language is to obtain the skill to manipulate this system. Since structures and skills can be learned and trained separately, as for testing, the main test items are discrete point “objective” test formats. Discrete items should be constructed, each of which will ideally reveal the learner's ability to handle one level of the language in terms of one of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Therefore, criticism of dictation in the past stemmed from the viewpoint influenced heavily by structural linguistics that favored testing the more discrete elements of language skills and wished to avoid the possibility of muddy measurement.
“Heaton commented on dictation: ‘a testing device it measures too many different language features to be effective in providing a means of assessing any one particular skill.’ This kind of test emphasizes strongly the accuracy and objectivity of scoring, which has a high reliability but on the other hand neglects the context and situation. Dictation measures a complex range of integrated skills and should not be regarded as constituting simply a test of spelling. The dictation of single words, nevertheless, can prove a fairly reliable test of spelling.” [2] Although dictation was considered as an effective means of testing device, Heaton still argued that dictation just test the students’ discrete elements of their language skills.
1.2 Approval of dictation
However, from the early 1970s, a new theory of language and language use began to exert a significant influence on language teaching and potentially on language testing. This was Hymes’s theory of communicative competence, which greatly expanded the scope of what was covered by an understanding of language and the ability to use language in context, particularly in terms of the social demands of performance. Hymes also saw that knowing a language was more than knowing its rules of grammar. Although the relevance of Hymes’s theory to language testing was recognized more or less immediately on its appearance, it took a decade for its actual impact on practice to be felt, in the development of communicative language tests. The theory of communicative competence represented a profound shift from a psychological perspective on language, which sees language as an internal phenomenon, to a sociological one, focusing on the external, social functions of language.
（转载自中国科教评价网http://www.nseac.com） Therefore, approval of dictation testing also has its theoretical basis. As the language testing entered the third stage, which was called the psycho-socio-linguistic stage. In other word, communicative language testing has become more and more predominant. As the main purpose of language learning is to acquire communicative skills, which contain language competence, discourse competence and language use skill, the effective tests should be those that can put each specific skill together to test students’ overall ability of using language.
