I have been involved in an English language testing assessment and evaluation course for the last 6 full days.  Therefore, although it is not my area of expertise I have been thinking about it frequently these days.
I am not a tester per se, but I have been part of the trials with my colleagues for a long time, and we kept thinking:
– Can the tests we have been creating be considered as valid?
– Are we testing exactly what we want to test?
– Are our questions too hard? Too easy?
– Are the texts we use suitable to the level?

Well, we thought that probably we were not the only group who have had the same concerns. Then we looked for some courses specifically designed for language testing. But there were not any :(. As in the case of famous teacher training cerificate programs, degree and masters programs, testing has been thought the last if ever. Such an important area needs a lot more focus.
Personally speaking, there should be degree programs in ELT Testing, Assesment and Evaluation.

Anyway, since it was not possible to change the curricula of the certificate programs, degree or masters programs, we came up with the idea of a 40-hour intensive course. Lovely IATEFL TEA SIG committee embraced the idea, and a week long course for 53 participants took place last week in Istanbul called TEA in ISTANBUL. The course tutors were Prof. Barry O’Sullivan, Sue Hackett, the IATEFL TEA SIG coordinator, Zeynep Urkun from Sabanci University and the IATEFL TEA SIG events coordinator and member of the IATEFL executive board member.

As an EFL teacher, I have had to test student performance all my professional life, sometimes by using ready made tests, sometimes by the tests I
prepared or a test of which preparation I was heavily part of it. Most of the English teachers do that as well. However, there are incredible details a tester has to consider while planning, preparing, administrating, marking and analysing the results if they want to do it as appropriately as they can. and even then, we learned that there isn’t such a thing called a perfect test.

I came to the conclusion that, while teaching is an art, testing must surely be science.

I kept the blog of the event with the help of my friends Burcu Akyol and Wayne Jones. If you want to know more about the specific details about assessing reading, speaking, writing, etc, there are useful notes, tips and great website addresses for checking the level of difficulty of the tests you create, please visit http://teainistanbul.wordpress.com

The link to the Lightbulb moments show comments and what the participants’ insights gained from the course.

Enjoy 🙂