Assessing the use of multiple-choice translation items in English proficiency tests: The case of the national English proficiency test in Turkey
-
Betül Hazal Dinçer
,
Elena Antonova-Unlu
und
Alper Kumcu
Abstract
The use of translation for language teaching and assessment, by and large, has been abandoned with the adoption of audio-lingual and communicative approaches in language teaching. As a result, nowadays translation items are not commonly used for measuring language proficiency in international language proficiency tests (e. g. TOEFL, IELTS).
However, there are several countries that still use translation items in their national language proficiency tests (e. g. Turkey, Japan, China, Romania among others). The present study aims to examine whether or not multiple-choice translation items are an appropriate tool for measuring proficiency in English. To this end, the perceived level of difficulty and validity of multiple-choice translation items in the National English Proficiency Test (YDS) in Turkey were examined. The findings revealed that the participants did significantly better on the translation items than on the rest of the test items. They also perceived the translation items as the easiest among all the rest items in YDS. Moreover, while YDS as a whole indicated a strong validity based on correlation with TOEFL PBT Reading Sample Test, the translation items indicated moderate validity. Importantly, there was a significant difference between the two correlations. These findings suggest that multiple-choice translation items are likely to lower the overall validity of YDS tests, inflate the scores of test-takers and, thus, might be considered as problematic for the quality of the tests.
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Article note
This paper is a revised version of an unpublished MA thesis written by B. Dinçer and supervised by E. Antonova-Unlu.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Training student writers in conducting peer feedback in L2 writing: A meaning-making perspective
- Assessing the use of multiple-choice translation items in English proficiency tests: The case of the national English proficiency test in Turkey
- Translingual negotiation strategies in CMC contexts: English-medium communication in online marketplaces
- Alignment effect in the continuation task of Chinese low-intermediate English learners
- Racializing the problem of and solution to foreign accent in business
- Migrant women, work, and investment in language learning: Two success stories
- Student motivation in Dutch secondary school EFL literature lessons
- Developing 21st century skills for the first language classroom: Investigating the relationship between Chinese primary students’ oral interaction strategy use and their group discussion performance
- How memories of study abroad experience are contextualized in the language classroom
- Spanish L1 EFL learners’ recognition knowledge of English academic vocabulary: The role of cognateness, word frequency and length
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Training student writers in conducting peer feedback in L2 writing: A meaning-making perspective
- Assessing the use of multiple-choice translation items in English proficiency tests: The case of the national English proficiency test in Turkey
- Translingual negotiation strategies in CMC contexts: English-medium communication in online marketplaces
- Alignment effect in the continuation task of Chinese low-intermediate English learners
- Racializing the problem of and solution to foreign accent in business
- Migrant women, work, and investment in language learning: Two success stories
- Student motivation in Dutch secondary school EFL literature lessons
- Developing 21st century skills for the first language classroom: Investigating the relationship between Chinese primary students’ oral interaction strategy use and their group discussion performance
- How memories of study abroad experience are contextualized in the language classroom
- Spanish L1 EFL learners’ recognition knowledge of English academic vocabulary: The role of cognateness, word frequency and length
