Kinds of testing Past Future Continuous Tense Subject

16

12. Future Perfect Continuous Tense Subject

Predicate Complement The pharmacists will have been working in the laboratory by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. The senior teachers will have been teaching the students in that classroom this afternoon.

13. Present Perfect Continuous Tense Subject

Predicate Complement The English class has been waiting since morning. Those lazy cats havebeen sleeping for an hour.

14. Past Perfect Continuous Tense Subject

Predicate Complement That gir had been playing the piano on that time. The junior pilot had been flying the plane.

15. Past Future Tense Subject

Predicate Complement My mother and I would have our dinner before she left to the Mexico city. My sisters would read the magazine before noon.

16. Past Future Continuous Tense Subject

Predicate Complement The terrorists would be bombing the city. The policeman would be arresting the thief.

3.2 Kinds of testing

According to the English teachers of the SMP Negeri 3 Binjai where the research is taken place that they have taught their students eight tenses. In order to take the data the writer of this paper only apply or asked deal with six 17 tenses. Therefore the test has the validity and reliability. So farin this chapter we have considered a number of uses to which test results are put. We now distinguish between two approaches to test constructions. Testing is said to be direct when it requires the candidate to perform precisely the skill which we wish to measure. If we want to know how well candidates can write compositions, we get them to write compositions. If we want to know how well they pronounce a language, we get them to speak. The tasks, and the texts which are used, should be as authentic as possible. The fact that candidates are aware that they are in a test situation means that the tasks cannot be really authentic. Nevertheless the effort is made to make them as realistic as possible. Direct testing is easier to carry out when it is intended to measure the productive skills of speaking and writing. The very acts of speaking and writing provide us with information about the candidate’s ability. With listening and reading, however, it is necessary to get candidates not only to listen or read but also to demonstrate that they have done this successfully. The tester has to devise methods of eliciting such evidence accurately and without the method interfering with the performance of the skills in which he or she is interested. Interestingly enough, in many texts on language testing it is the testing of productive skills that is presented as being most problematic, for reasons usually connected with reliability. Direct testing has a number of attractions. First, provided that we are clear about just what abilities we want to assess, it is relatively straightforward to create 18 the conditions which will elicit the behavior on which to base our judgments. Secondly, at least in the case of the productive skills, the assessment and interpretation of students’ performance is also quite straightforward. Thirdly, since practice for the test involves practice of the skills that we wish to foster, there is likely to be a helpful backwash effect. Indirect testing attempts to measure the abilities which underlie the skills in which we are interested. One section of the test, for example was developed as an indirect measure of writing ability. It contains items of the following kind: at first Perhaps the main appeal of indirect testing is that it seems to offer the possibility of testing a representative sample of a finite number of abilities which underlie a potentially indefinitely large number of manifestations of them. If, for example, we take a representative sample of grammatical structures, then, it may be argued. Then we have taken a sample which is relevant for all the situations in which control of grammar is necessary. By contrast, direct testing is inevitable the old woman seemed unwilling to accept anything was offered her by my friend and I.where the candidate has to identify which of the underlined elements is erroneous or inappropriate in formal standard English. While the ability to respond to such items has been shown to be related statistically to the ability to write compositions though the strength of the relationship was not particularly great, it is clearly not the same thing Another example of indirect testing is Lado 1961 proposed method of testing pronunciation ability by a paper and pencil test in which the candidate has to identify pairs of words which rhyme with each other. 19 limited to a rather small sample of tasks, which may call on a restricted and possibly unrepresentative range of grammatical structures. On this argument, indirect testing is superior to direct testing in that its results are more general sable. The main problem with indirect tests is that the relationship between performance on them and performance of the skills in which we are usually more interested tends to be rather weak in strength and uncertain in nature. We do not yet know enough about the component parts of, say, composition writing to predict accurately composition writing ability from scores on tests which measure the abilities which we believe underlie it. We may construct rests of grammar, vocabulary, discourse markers, handwriting, punctuation, and what we will. But we still will not be able to predict accurately scores on compositions even if we make sure of the representativeness of the composition scores by taking many samples. It seems to me that in our present state of knowledge, at least as far as proficiency and final achievement tests are concerned, it is preferable to concentrate on direct testing. Provided that we sample reasonably widely for example require at least two compositions, each calling for a different kind of writing and on a different topic, we can expect more accurate estimates of the abilities that really concern us than would be obtained through indirect testing. The fact that direct tests are generally easier to construct simply reinforces this view with respect to institutional tests, as does their greater potential for beneficial backwash. It is only fair to say, however, that many testers are reluctant to commit 20 themselves entirely to direct testing and will always include an indirect element in their tests. Of course, to obtain diagnostic information on underlying abilities, such as control of particular grammatical structures, indirect testing is called for.

3.3 Validity