Behaviorism Behaviorism Empirical studies were primarily descriptive and totally objective in nature. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a growing consensus was reached that behaviourist theories of L2 learning were inadequate. L2 learners, like L1 learners, were credited with a ‘built-in-syllabus’ (Corder, 1967), which guided their progress. According to the behaviourist hypothesis, the mind of…
Declarative Knowledge Declarative knowledge is the same as explicit or controlled knowledge, whereas procedural knowledge is the same is implicit or uncontrolled knowledge. Internalised rules and memorised chunks of the language constitute the ‘what’ of the learner’s system or declarative knowledge (McLaughlin, 1987). Ellis (1994): “Declarative rules can have top-down influences on perception, in particular…
IELTS Writing Task 1 | Population Growth IELTS Writing Task 1 | Population Growth Instructions: The table, graph or bar chart below shows population figures for India and China since the year 2000 and predicted population growth up until 2050. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information delineated in the graph. General…
IELTS Writing Task 1 | Leisure Time IELTS Writing Task 1 | Leisure Time ?Instructions: The table, graph or bar chart below shows the number of hours of leisure time during a week enjoyed by males and females across various employment status. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information delineated in the…
Evidence-Centered Design Evidence-centered Design was developed by Mislevy. It is important that we see the tasks or items that we design for tests as part of a larger picture, and one approach to doing this in a systematic way is ECD, a methodology for test design and construction developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS) (Mislevy, 2003).…
Speech Acts Speech acts are carried out over various turns and their exact shape takes into account interlocutor reactions. In other words, conversation is co-constructed by both interlocutors, which is something that can never be simulated with DCTs. Speech acts are certainly the most researched area of pragmatics, and they are arguably the most social,…
Competence Competence corresponds to the I-language (Internal Language). Competency is the speaker/hearer’s knowledge of his language. It’s an abstract version of knowledge. Competency is independent of situation. It represent what the speaker knows in the abstract. The different types of competence are: grammatical competency, linguistic competency, communicative competency, pragmatic competency, Communicative Competency: Discourse Competency: The…
Classroom Assessment Classroom Assessment According to Brookhart (2003), in classroom assessment, assessment and learning are integrated within the classroom. She sees this in terms of Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development, or that space between what the individual can accomplish independently and what he/she can do with assistance. Personal knowledge of the…
Reverse Engineering Reverse engineering (RE) is an idea of ancient origin; the name was coined by Davidson and Lynch (2002), but they are the first to admit that all they created was the name. RE is an analytical process of test creation that begins with an actual test question and infers the guiding language that…
Test Specifications Test specifications – usually called ‘specs’ – are generative explanatory documents for the creation of test tasks. Specs tell us the nuts and bolts of how to phrase the test items, how to structure the test layout, how to locate the passage, and how to make a host of difficult choices as we…