Current TESL issues (Teaching English as a Second Language) in an interactive fashion enriched with distinctive keywords and tags and comment forms to discuss the issues
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…
Reverse Engineering Reverse engineering (RE) is an idea of ancient origin; the name was coined by Davidson and Lynch, 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 drives…
Classroom Assessment Classroom Assessment According to Brookhart, 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 learner…
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…
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,…
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). ECD is…
Input Processing Theory Input Processing Theory VanPatten’s Input Processing Theory is based on the standard information processing viewpoint. Namely, working memory is limited in capacity (at least in terms of each modality), making it difficult for learners to attend concurrently to different stimuli in the input. He identified ‘detection’ as the key attentional process, noting…
Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues All normal children appear to contain within themselves the ability to create a language in spite of wide variations in experience. External auditory simulation is available to the fetus, although attenuated. Mother’s voice is a prominent sound in the amniotic environment, experience with…
Genie and Critical Period Hypothesis Genie Born in 1957, Genie experienced extreme deprivation beginning at about twenty months of age when she was confined to a dark room in the back of a house, harnessed to a potty seat by day and strapped in a sleeping bag in a caged crib at night, until she…
Individual Differences Individual Differences Learners clearly differ enormously in their preferred approach to L2 learning, but it is impossible to say which learning style works best (Ellis, 2008). One of the major problems is that the concept of ‘learning style’ is ill-defined, apparently overlapping with other individual differences of both an affective and a cognitive…