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Blagodarna T.P., Blagodarna O.M., PhD
Karazin Kharkiv National University
PROS AND CONS OF C-TESTING
Testing is certainly not the only way to
assess students, but there are many good reasons for including a test in one’s
language course.
A test can give the teacher valuable
information about where the students are in their learning and can affect what
the teacher will cover next. They will help a teacher to decide if teaching has
been effective and help to highlight what needs to be reviewed. Testing can be
as much an assessment of the teaching as the learning. On the other hand, tests can give students a sense of accomplishment as
well as information about what they know and what they need to review.
In the 1970s students in an intensive EFL
program were taught in an unstructured conversation course. They complained
that even though they had a lot of time to practise communicating, they felt as
if they hadn't learned anything. Not long afterwards a testing system was
introduced and helped to give them a sense of satisfaction that they were
accomplishing things. Tests can be extremely motivating and give students a
sense of progress. They can highlight areas for students to work on and tell
them what has and hasn't been effective in their learning (3).
Tsts can also have a positive effect as
they encourage students to review material covered on the course. Tests are
also a learning opportunity after they have been taken. The feedback after a
test can be invaluable in helping a student to understand something he/she
couldn't do during the test. Thus the test is a review in itself.
In this paper we would like to describe a so-called C-test and outline its strong
and weak points as compared to cloze tests.
The C-test was developed developed in Duisburg by Christine Klein-Braley and Ulrich Raatz
(4). Since then this language-testing instrument has
gained wide popularity because of its high reliability sufficient validity and
remarkable practicality.
The C-test was developed as a modification
of the cloze test, which is a frequently used, major language-testing
instrument, extremely popular because of the ease of constructing it and its
high reliability and validity. Though the cloze test consists of a longer text
of which every fifth to tenth complete word is left out.
The C-test is an integrative testing
instrument that measures over all language competence, very much
like the cloze test. It consists of four to six short,
preferably authentic texts in the target language, to which "the rule of two" has been applied: the second half of
every second word has been deleted, beginning with the
second word of the second sentence; the first and last sentences are left
intact. If a word has an odd number of letters, the "bigger"
part is omitted, e.g., “proud” becomes “pr”. One letter words, such as I, are ignored in the counting. The students' task is to
restore the missing parts. In a typical C-test there are 100 gaps – that is,
missing parts. Only entirely correct restorations are
accepted.
The C-test appears to have some advantages
over the cloze test:
- As students are confronted with a
variety of short passages, a better sampling of content areas is possible.
Also, a person with special knowledge in a certain field does not have an
unfair advantage.
- By "damaging" every second
word, we can obtain a more representative sample of all the different language
elements in the text than in the cloze, where normally only every fifth or
sixth word is left out.
- Many more items can be included in much
shorter texts, making the test less time-consuming for the students than the
cloze.
- Unlike the cloze test, scoring is easy
and objective, as there is only one acceptable solution in most cases.
- As a rule, students actually like doing
C-tests, whereas the cloze test is one of the most frustrating test types for
learners.
The following short C-test is an example:
"One cool autumn evening, Bob L.,
a young professional, returned home from a trip to the supermarket to find his
computer gone.
Gone! All so___ of
cr___ thoughts ra___ through h___ mind: H___ it be___ stolen? H___ it be___ kidnapped?
H___ searched h___ house f___ a cl___ until h___ noticed a
sm___ piece î___ printout pa___ stuck un___ a maga___ on h___ refrigerator do___. His he___ sank
a___ he re___ this sim___ message: CAN'T CONTINUE, FILE CLOSED, BYE.”
To see how C-tests work in practice, let’s
look at the research results provided by Lucy Katona and Zoltan Dornyei
(Budapest, Hungary), who decided to compare the C-test with the cloze and other
complex language tests to see how well it measures the learners' language
proficiency. The investigations were carried out at the English Department of Eotvos
Lorand University, Budapest. They involved 102 first-year English majors, who
took five different kinds of tests (2):
- the English Department Proficiency Test
(vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension)
- TOEIC (the Test of English for
International Communication), which is an American standardized multiple-choice
test for adult non-native speakers of English consisting of listening
comprehension and reading
- an oral interview
- a cloze test
- a C-test
After careful statistical analysis of the
collected data the following results emerged: the C-test appears to correlate
well with other language-proficiency tests, which proves that it is a good and
reliable testing instrument. It is also an integrative language-testing method,
correlating highly with both vocabulary and grammar scores, as well as speaking skills
Finally, the researchers recommended the
exact scoring method (that is, accepting only entirely
correct restorations), as they found that accepting words with spelling errors made no significant difference to the student rankings (1).
Another conclusion may be that the C-test
is an excellent testing method, as it provides a good and quick assessment of
general language competence. In can be used with the aim:
- to select and place students in
appropriate groups
- to assess their achievement at
end-of-term exams by selecting several typical passages from the term's
materials
- to test certain grammar areas (e.g.,
tenses or word formation) by including texts that contain several examples of
the structures in question
- to check home reading or homework by
taking passages from the texts the students had to work on
- to measure the specialized knowledge of
ESP groups by choosing suitable texts from their particular field of
specialization
One more advantage of the C-tests is that
students can easily design C-tests for each other, which could be made into a
game or competition. The conclusion is that C-test is one of the most versatile
test types and can be adapted to many different purposes. It can be strongly
recommend for incorporating into everyday teaching and testing activities.
REFERENCES:
1. Teacher
development. Making the right moves (2004). - edited by Thomas Kral. – United
States Information Agency, Washington D.C.
2. The Educational Testing Service (2000). – Princeton, N.J.
3. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/testing-assessment
4. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~roever/lingu.htm