Principles of Language Assessment

     H. Douglas Brown, shows us in this chapter how principles of Language Assessment can and should be applied to formal, previously published or created tests and assessments of all kinds.  According to the author, there are five important principles for “testing a test” which are practicality, reliability, authenticity, and washback.  When Practicality is mentioned in the field of evaluating, it means that tests need to be practical. In here a practical test encompasses some characteristics such as a) not being extensive, b) stay in the appropriate time constraints, c) easy to administer and, d) have a specific and time-efficient scoring procedure.

     A second principle is Reliability; it is important to say that when a test is reliable it needs to be consistent and dependable. But tests don’t have it all the time; there are many factors that contribute to the unreliability of a test such as a) Student-related reliability; b) Rater reliability c) Test administration reliability and d) Test reliability.  As a third principle Validity encompasses the extent to which inferences made from assessment results are meaningful and useful for the purpose of the assessment (Gronlund, 1998. P. 226). There are some types of evidence that need to be taken into account when talking about validity which are a) Content-related evidence, b) Criterion-related evidence, c) Construct-related evidence, d) Consequential validity and e) Face validity.

     A fourth major principle of language testing is Authenticity.  Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) define it as the degree of correspondence of the characteristics o a given language test task to the features of a target language task.  In the test, it can be present in the following ways a) the language is as natural as possible; b) there are contextualized items; c) there are meaningful topics and d) items are thematically organized.  Finally a fifth principle of testing is Washback; it includes the effects of an assessment on teaching and learning prior to the assessment itself, that is, on preparation for the assessment.  I large-scale assessment, it refers to the effect that tests have on instruction of how students prepare for the test.

To sum up I can say that I didn’t know anything about all those concepts but now that I’m aware of its meaning and importance it is necessary for me to say that it’ll be a big challenge to be able to design a “real test” taking into account the previous principles.