TESTING AND ASSESSMENT OF ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES FOR NON-MAJOR STUDENTS AT THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION, VIETNAM

TESTING AND ASSESSMENT OF ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES FOR NON-MAJOR STUDENTS AT THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION, VIETNAM

Nguyen Quoc Thuy

Lecturer, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University of Education,

Vietnam, Thai Nguyen

Vi Thị Trung

 Lecturer, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University of Education,

Vietnam, Thai Nguyen

ABSTRACT

At Thai Nguyen University of Education (TNUE), the module of English for Specific Purposes is conducted after the students complete the basic English modules. The purpose of the course is to improve students' specialized English so that they can use it for their majors while they are still at university as well as for their future work. The assessment test of English for Specific Purposes is very important, and it has its own characteristics. The article refers to the forms, principles, and criteria of the kind of assessment test at TNUE.

Keywords: module, English for Specific Purposes, assessment, principles, criteria.

1. Testing and assessment and principles for designing assessment tests

In education, testing and assessment are systematic processes to determine the level of achievement in terms of knowledge, thinking development skills, and learners' educational attainment in teaching.

In the Vietnamese Great Dictionary, testing is understood as "considering the essence and reality" [1]. Testing is a method of assessing learners' achievements, measuring actual results, and comparing them with set standards and objectives in order to discover what has been and has not been achieved, causes, and factors that affect the results, etc., thereby giving corrective measures to achieve the goal.

Assessment is an activity to identify and confirm the actual value of the level of task completion, work quality and efficiency, level of thinking development, and the experiences formed at the present time of someone compared with the established goals or standards. On that basis, corrective measures are given to help him or her to improve work quality and efficiency. Thus, assessment is “evaluating, commenting on value" [1] of someone's work.

The best tool to test and assess student learning outcomes is to design a quality test that properly evaluates the students' learning process as well as the knowledge that students gain. According to Brown [2], when designing an assessment test, it is necessary to pay attention to the following principles:

- Validity: a test is designed to measure exactly what it is intended to measure, or each part of the test becomes a measure of what is to be measured (Henning, 1987) [3]. There are two types of validity commonly mentioned in assessment methods. The first is content validity. The test achieves content validity when it covers the entire taught content of a subject or training program. On that basis, it is possible to build questions that represent groups of content or the entire content. The questions must have an even distribution of difficulty.

The second, more demanding type of accuracy is predictive validity or criterion validity. Each subject or training program has its own goals, so tests must also be designed to measure the achievement of those goals. If the prediction criteria are not reflected, the test is incorrect.

- Reliability: The test must be reliable, or in other words, it must give the same results on different tests.

- Practicality: We need to consider factors such as the organization of the exam, the format of the test, the source of the material, the test elements, and the scoring method.

- Authenticity: Authenticity is the degree of correspondence between sections of the test and its usability. This is a very important feature in a language test because it allows users to speculate on a student's language ability based on their scores.

- Washback: It is the impact of tests on learning activities, especially their results affecting the future of students and the reputation of teachers.

These five principles provide teachers with helpful guidelines in designing effective tests and assessments.

2. Testing and assessment of English for specific purposes at TNUE

2.1. Designing tests of specialized English

Changes in the goals of teaching specialized English in recent years have led to a change in understanding about the role of testing and assessment of this subject. The assessment not only aims to test the number of specialized vocabulary, different grammatical forms, and structures that students have acquired but also to assess the ability to apply these linguistic elements in practice. This goal requires a change in the assessment and testing methods of the English course for specific purposes. In this English course, the assessment content is geared towards the non-major students' ability to use the specialized English language. The forms of assessment are stated in "Regulations on assessment of learning outcomes of formal training students"[4] of TNUE.

Table 1.

Course Assesssment

Thus, the students' ability to use specialized English at TNUE is considered through two types of assessments: formative and summative.

Formative assessment score accounts for 50% of the total score of the subject, including a point of diligence, a point of regularity and periodic points according to the Regulation on formal university training under the current credit system.

* The diligence score is used to recognize the student's learning attitude, positivity, seriousness, and assiduity. The criteria used in the assessment of diligence are proactivity, the level of active preparation of lessons and participation in activities during the lessons, the time required to attend the course…[5].

*Regular assessment can be done through “assessment of individual assignments, essays, group assignments, practices, seminars.” Students' regular assessment scores are determined by completing exercises provided on virtual software Canvas [5].

*Periodic assessment is a form of assessing students' learning outcomes after completing a part of the course program. The format and assessment criteria are the same as tets at the end of the course [5].

The summative assessment score accounts for 50% of the total score of the subject and is conducted through the final exam. The design of this specialized English test needs to be seriously considered, to ensure that the assessment of students' foreign language ability is objective and accurate. When designing the final test, we pay more attention to writing-using language skills, reading skills, and then listening-speaking skills. The purpose of this is that the test is built in accordance with the characteristics of English for professional purposes. As a result, the summative assessment becomes more accurate and encouraging for non-English major students.

The teachers of the Foreign Language Department who were trained at the Foreign Language Testing Center have participated in the process of building the test and implementing the assessment according to the regulations of TNUE. Here is the structure of an assessment test and its rubrics:

- Writing - using language skills: The task of this section is to examine the level of formation skills in writing texts related to students' majors. The section consists of three specific tasks: (1) Using the right vocabulary to write simple sentences, sentences with complex grammatical structures, or a paragraph on certain topics. (2) Writing a letter to discuss some problems at work. (3) Writing an essay to express the opinion for or against based on certain topics. Students have two options: (1) and (2) or (3) and (1) or (2) depending on the level and English ability assessed in the basic English module. Students with Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate levels are recommended to perform tasks (1) and (2). Meanwhile, students with an Upper-Intermediate/Advanced level should complete assignments (3) and (1) or (2). The duration of the test is 80 minutes.

- Reading Skills: The reading test is conducted in the VSTEP (Vietnamese Standardized Test of English Proficiency) format with the aim of testing students' different reading sub-skills. In the exam, there are 4 passages of text (the total number of words in the 4 passages will range from 1700-2000 words), the passages will deal with different issues according to the major you are studying. Students must answer a total of 40 questions in the form of: Main Idea Questions, Words-in-context, Inference Questions, and Text-Completion with increasing difficulty of the test. The duration of the test is 60 minutes.

- Listening - Speaking skills: Interview and chat with teachers according to the student's specialized content. This section includes 3 tasks:

(1) Interviewing on personal topics, majors, interests, plans for the future… (2-3 minutes)

(2) Presenting a given issue (3-4 minutes)

(3) Discussing with the teacher after reading about an issue related to the major students are studying. (4-5 minutes)

In addition to the above content, we also compose additional questions to assess and accurately determine the level and specialized foreign language ability of students. The students who have successfully completed the 3 tasks above will be asked to present more about a certain problem based on three small questions (maximum presentation time 3 minutes). The score for this presentation will also be added to the score for the entire exam.

Table 2.

Exam structure for the specialized English course

The assessment criteria for each section, each task, as well as the grading scales, are unified and specific so that teachers can accurately determine the student's ability in each language skill.

* Assessment criteria for Writing-Using language skills: Content of the writing; Consistency and coherence of the writing; Form of the writing; Diversity and accuracy of linguistic data; Correct spelling and punctuation. The maximum score for writing - using language skills is 20 points.

* Assessment criteria for Listening - Speaking skills: The content of the presentation; Consistency and coherence in oral expression; Appropriate interaction when communicating; Variety and accuracy of use of language skills; Use of phonetics and intonation when communicating. The maximum score for this section is 10 points.

* Reading skills are assessed on a computer. The score for the reading skills is the total number of points received for correct answers. The maximum score for this section is 20 points.

The score of the final test is converted to a 10-point scale. The course score is the sum scores of the formative assessment and summative assessment.

2.2. Discussion and solutions

After the tests, we made statistics and analyzed the results obtained through the students' work, reviewed the evaluation criteria and content based on objective and subjective aspects, and adjusted correct or removed inappropriate test criteria and contents. We also regularly survey the students' opinions on the exam format and the difficulty of each section and remind them of the things to keep in mind for better performance on future exams.

Through statistical data such as discrimination coefficient, correlation coefficient, and completion rate of tasks in the English language specialized exam, we find that the students perform well in reading comprehension, and the results are reliable and accurate.  The skills of using grammatical structures and vocabulary in the context of the specialized field have been formed well. The weakest skill is listening and speaking. This shows the difference in the level of formation of specialized speaking skills and ordinary communication speaking skills. Analyzing typical errors helps us make more detailed conclusions about the level of formation of the students' skills being tested and provide recommendations for the formation of different skills in the English course for specific purposes.

It can be seen that in the reading comprehension skill, the selection of incorrect answers in the "Multiple Choice" type of exercise is due to the students not carefully reading the language of the question and the related text. In the "Substitute Answer" type of exercise, students have difficulties in finding the necessary information in the reading and drawing the correct conclusion. They only choose the answer when there are similar words in the question and the text. Therefore, in order to fully understand the content of the reading assignments in class and in the exam, teachers should ask students to choose answers in the exercises and in the exam based on the information in the text, not based on what they think or know about the suggested issue; the vocabulary in the question of the exercises and exams often does not match the words in the text, so synonyms or close meanings should be noted.

In writing-using language skills, the most difficult thing is to use sentence structures with complex subjects. Analysis of typical mistakes in this section shows that exercises to practice the skills of using coherent grammar and vocabulary in thematic texts are very useful. It has a huge impact on the results of performing the type of exercise “Writing a letter to discuss some problems at work" or "Writing an essay to express the opinion for or against based on certain topics". Typical mistakes in writing letters that students often make are not giving enough necessary information as required, not using indirect questions, using wrong word order, spelling, addressing, and communication logic … When writing an essay, many students are often unable to give an opposing point of view, the conclusion at the end of the essay is inconsistent with what has been said before. Therefore, when teaching students writing-using language skills, teachers should familiarize students with different types and forms of writing exercises, guide them to understand the topic of the writing and pay attention to the necessary information to be presented in their work. Students have to be taught how to come up with arguments and supporting facts and how to use the right means of linking within sentences, between sentences, and between parts of a text.

In the "Listening - Speaking skills" section, when taking the "Presenting a given issue" test, students are not able to express their views logically and fluently. Instead, they can only come up with phrases. Most of them have difficulty expressing their reasonable opinion. In task 3 of this section, students often rely on the background knowledge of their major to discuss with the teachers rather than using the information given in the test.

2.3. Some recommedations

Based on the results of our work, the results of the student questionnaires, and the feedback from the teachers at TNUE, we make the following recommendations:

- Create and continuously update a bank of standardized exercises suitable to the required criteria in the sections "Listening - Speaking skills," "Reading skills," and "Writing - using language skills."

- The questions and texts included in the exercises and tests must have the content corresponding to the subject topics or related to the student's main major.

- Continuously renew the English exam bank according to the professional orientation and the development of the society.

3. Conclusion

Assessment plays an important role in improving the quality of teaching and learning. The accuracy and effectiveness of the results of the assessment tests depend heavily on the quality of the test itself, the scale, the formative assessment, and the organization of the examination and marking.

It is important to design a test to assess specialized English competence in a scientific way, covering the program and suitable for each major students.

For students, a realistic, accurate, and objective assessment test indicates the level of their foreign language ability, helping them to be confident and enthusiastic and improve their creativity in learning.

For teachers, the test - assessment provides information about the student's learning situation, from which there are timely instructions, correction of deviations, encouragement of good learning methods, and corrections teaching activities to ensure the implementation of the foreign language teaching and learning objectives in general and the English course for specific purposes in particular.

References:

1. Nguyen Nhu Y (1998). Great Vietnamese dictionary. Culture and Information Publishing House
2. Brown, H. D. (2004). Language Assessment. Principles and Classroom Practices. New York. Longman.
3. Henning, G. (1987). A Guide to Language Testing. Development, Evaluation, Research. Cambridge, MA. Newbury House
4. TNUE. (2020). Regulations on assessing the learning outcomes of students of formal training. Decision No. 200/QD-DHSP. February 3, 2020.
5. Nguyen Quoc Thuy. (2023). Formative assessments in English modules at Thai Nguyen University of Education, Vietnam. Scientific journal "Internauka". No. 3(273). Publishing house "Internauka". Moscow.