Name: Nguyễn Công Định

Student ID: 2167012011

Chapter 10 – Summary
Assessing Grammar and Vocabulary
Form-focused assessment is widely used in assessing grammar and vocabulary, which means
focusing on the form and the meaning of grammar and vocabulary.

Assessing Grammar

Grammar is central to language description and test taker performance. Today, the knowledge
of grammar is evaluated by its correct use in communication through listening, speaking,
reading and writing in second language.

Communicative competence has four components: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse,

and strategic competence. Grammatical knowledge consists of three elements;

- Grammatical forms or the structure of languae

- The grammatical meaning of those forms.
- Their pragmatic meaning or use in a given context.

Selected Response

Multiple-choice tasks

The most common selected response task presents a blank or underlined words in a sentence
and the test taker musr choose the correct response from the options that are given.

Discrimination tasks

The tasks that ask the test taker to attend to input that can be either language or non-language
and to respond in the form of a choice between or among contrasts or oposites, such as
true/false.

Noticing tasks or consciousness-raising tasks

Test takers are asked to indicate (undeline or circle) that they have identified a specific
feature in the language sample.

Limited Production

Gap-filling tasks
The language is presented in the form of sentence, dialogue, or passage in which a number of
words are deleted. The test takers must choose the appropriate response for the deletion or
gap based on the context in which language is presented.

Short-answer tasks

The input is presented in form of a question following reading pasage or oral/visual stimulus.
The expected test taker response can vary from single word to a sentence or two.

Dialogue-completion tasks

The input is presented in the form of a short conversation or dialogue in which a part of the
exchange or the entire exchange is left blank and the expected response meant to be
grammatically correct.

Extended production

Information gap tasks

Presents the input in terms of incomplete information. That is, one test taker is given half- or
some- of the information and another test taker is given complementary information. Both
test takers then have question each other to get all the information.

Role-play or Simulation tasks

The input presents test taker with a language or non-language prompt that asks them to take
on a role or stimulate a situation to solve a problem, make decision, or perform some
transaction collaboratively.

Assessing Vocabulary

The nature of vocabulary

We can identify words as tokens and types. Tokens are all the words in the paragraph. Types,
on the other hand, do not count words that are repeated, only words that are different forms.

Function words – prepositons, articles, conjunctions, and other words are seen as belonging
more to the grammar of the language than vocabulary. Content words are nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs.

Some vocabulary tests have might focus larger on lexical items such as phrasal verbs, or
compound words, or idioms, which have meaning only as a whole unit.

Four types of lexical phrases:

- Poly words
- Institutionalized expression
- Phrasal constraints
- Sentence builders
Defining lexical knowledge

The context of vocabulary use

Vocabulary knowledge and fundamental processes

Metacognitive strategies for vocabulary use

Some consideration in designing assessment tasks

- Clarify your purpose

- Define your construct
- Select your target words: high-frequency words, low-frequency words, specialized
vocabulary, sub-technical words.
- Determine mode of performance: receptive and productive vocabulary

Receptive Vocabulary

First, it is important to consider what role the context plays in the item. One function of
the context is to indicate a specific meaning of a high-frequency words. Second, the
learners must be able to recognize the word based on given context.

- Vocabulary in a one-sentence context: high-frequency words

- Vocabulary in a one-sentence context: low-frequency words
- Vocabulary matching exercise
- Words association

Productive Vocabulary

A common vocabuary test type is sentence completion, where the target vocabulary item
is deleted from a sentence and the test takers must understand the context in which the
word occurs in order to produce the missing word.

- Fill the blank

- Selective deletion cloze.