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National Examination that the test-makers have made in case of its content validity and authenticity. Furthermore, the findings of this research could
be significant considerations for the National Examination test-designers in designing the English language tests, particularly in the future National
Examination.
3. For Future Researchers
This study provides meaningful data related to the content validity and authenticity of English test items of National Examination year 2012
which is useful for future researchers as references in conducting research in English language tests. Moreover, the future researchers are able to
explore this research more and reveal other findings by applying other high technical research instruments to obtain data. Therefore, there would
be more detail information related to the content validity and authenticity of English test discovered.
F. Definition of Terms
There are definitions of the terms used in this study which relates to content validity, authenticity, National Examination, and senior high
school. The definitions are taken from several experts and certain education regulations. The terms are defined as follows.
1. Content Validity
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Gronlund 1998 says , “validity is the extent to which inferences made
from assessment result are appropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment” as cited in Brown, 2004, p.22. It simply means that
in order to make a test valid, appropriate and meaningful, the test should reflect the lesson objectives. Besides reflecting the lesson objectives, the test result
should be appropriately connected to the purpose of the test and one of the validity facets is content validity.
Brown 2004 adds if a test has content validity, the items of the test represent the measured subject-matter or behavior in order to evaluate
achievement or proficiency tests p.23. In addition, the test content should reflect the target tasks which are organized in the test specifications and the lesson
objectives. In this study, the researcher dealt with the content of English test items of National Examination year 2012 for senior high schools in order to analyze the
validity of its content by comparing the test content with the relevant test specifications incorporated in Graduate Competence Standard and the lesson
objectives which are incorporated in Competence Standard and Basic Competence.
2. Authenticity
Authenticity is a matter of appropriateness which is referred to the test items’ content and construction. Authenticity of test items is able to be analyzed
into two elements namely test tasks and test texts. In the relation to the test task, Bachman and Palmer 1996 explains that authenticity is the scale of the relation
between the characteristics of a given language test task and the characteristics of
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the target language as cited in Brown, 2004, p.28. It indicates that in order a test task meets authenticity; the test task should simulate a real-
world task and the test task ’s aim is not to test a grammatical form of
language. This is also referred to a statement about authentic texts from William 1984. He states that authentic texts are written to convey a
message as cited in Day, 2003, p.4. It means that the authentic texts aim mainly for communication and
not for teaching grammar or lexis. However, the language used in both test tasks and test texts should be as natural as the target language. The target
language used in National Examination is American English and British English. Therefore, the authenticity contains five visible and important
