Principles and Purpose of

Language Assessment
Prepared by: Erika Joyce M. Santos
 Key Concepts
Evaluation is the process of analysing, reflecting
upon, and summarising assessment information, and
making judgements and/or decisions based on the
information collected.
Measurement refers to the set of procedures and
the principles on how to use those procedures in
educational tests and assessment. Some of the basic
principles of measurement would be raw scores,
percentile ranks, derived scores, standard scores,
etc.
 Key Concepts
Assessment is the process of gathering information on
student learning. It may include test, and may also
include methods such as observations, interviews,
behaviour monitoring, etc.
a. Informal assessment can take a number of forms:
• unplanned comments, verbal feedback to
students, observing students perform a task or
work in small groups, and so on.
b. Formal assessment are exercises or procedures
which are:
• systematic
• give students and teachers an appraisal of
students’ achievement such as tests.
c. Formative Assessment is evaluating students in the
process of forming their competencies and skills with
the goal of helping them to continue that growth
process.
d. Summative Assessment aims to measure, or
summarize, what the student has grasped, and
typically occurs at the end of the course or unit of
instruction.
 Language Assessment
Assessment in language teaching has
purpose to evaluate the students
mastery both students skills and
knowledge.
 Principles of Language Assessment
1. Practicality
 Not expensive, within appropriate time constraint, relatively
easy to administer, and it must be a scoring/ evaluation
procedure that is specific and time-efficient.
2. Reliability
 Consistency of assessment results (Linn & Gronlund).
 A test is reliable if: You give the same test to the same
student or matched students on two different occasions, the
test should yield similar results. (Brown, 2004)
 Factors that may influence the reliability of a test:
 Students-related reliability
 Rater reliability
 Test administration reliability
 Test reliability
 Principles of Language Assessment
3. Validity
 Measuring what should be measure.
• Content-Related- If a test samples the subject matter
about which conclusions are to be drawn and if it requires
the test-taker to perform the behavior that is being
measured.
• Criterion-Related Evidence- it is used to demonstrate the
accuracy of a measure or procedure by comparing it with
another measure or procedure which has been demonstrated
to be valid.
• Construct Related Evidence- How well performance on the
assessment can be interpreted as meaningful measure of
some characteristics or quality.
• Consequential Validity- How well use of assessment results
accomplishes intended purposes and avoids unintended
effect.
 Principles of Language Assessment
• Face Validity- It refers to the degree to which a test looks right, and
appears to measure the knowledge or ability it claims to measure, based
on the subjective judgment of the examinees who take it, the
administrative personnel who decide on its use, and other
psychometrically unsophisticated observers (Mousavi in Brown, 2004)
4. Authenticity
 The language: as natural as possible.
 Items: contextualized rather than isolated.
 Topics: meaningful (relevant, interesting) for the learner.
 Some thematic organization to items is provided, such as through a
story line or episode.
 Tasks represent, or closely approximate, real-world tasks.
5. Washback
 The effect of testing on teaching and learning (Hughes in Brown, 2004).
 Generally refers to the effects tests have on instruction in terms of
how students prepare for the test (Brown, 2004).
 Purpose of Assessment
Diagnose students strengths and needs
Provide feedback on student learning
Provide a basis for instructional placement
Inform and guide instruction
Communicate learning expectations
Motivate and focus students’ attention and
effort
Provide practice applying knowledge and
skills
 Purpose of Assessment
Provide a basis for evaluation for the
purpose of:
Grading
Promotion/graduation
Program admission/selection
Accountability
Gauge program effectiveness
 Functions of Language Test
In learning, it is used to measure student’s
ability to discover how much they have been
learning, to diagnose the student’s strengths
and weaknesses, and to motivate learning.
In teaching, it is a means to ensure and
improve effective teaching quality to obtain
feedback on students learning.
In research, it serves as a basis related to
language proficiency, language processing,
language acquisition, language attrition and
language teaching.