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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This chapter presents the conclusions of this research and recommendation. The first part is conclusion of the research to answer the research question. The
second part is recommendations for English teachers, test designers of National Examination and future researchers who have similar interest in conducting
research in English language tests.
A. Conclusions
This research obtains two main results to answer the research problems stated in the first chapter. First, how valid is the content of English test items of
National Examination year 2012 for senior high schools related to the lesson objectives and the test specifications? Second, how authentic is English test items
of National Examination year 2012 for senior high schools related to the criteria of authenticity set by Brown?
The researcher conducted document analysis to get data in order to answer two research problems as stated above. The instruments of collecting data which
were utilized in this research were checklists. The checklists were divided into five kinds of checklists. The first checklist is utilized to ensure the content validity
of the test specifications. The second checklist is to check content validity of English test items, both listening and reading test, of National Examination year
2012 for senior high schools based on test specifications. The third checklist is
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80 employed to check the authenticity of the listening test items on National
Examination year 2012 for senior high schools. Then, the fourth checklist is employed to check the authenticity of the reading test tasks on National
Examination year 2012 for senior high schools. The last checklist is utilized to check the authenticity of the reading test texts on National Examination year 2012
for senior high schools. The preliminary data show similar test passages and test tasks in several
test versions. In test versions C71 and D32, for instance, 93 of the test passages on both test versions are similar. Besides, the test passage and the test task on the
question number 16 of every test version are similar. This shows a mismatch between the research findings and Education Ministry’sobjectivesof applying
several test versions in National Examination in order to avoid students’ fraudulence. In comparing the content of Competence Standard and Basic
Competence with Graduate Competence Standard, the results were that 100 of the contents on Graduate Competence Standard reflect the contents of
Competence Standard and Basic Competence. It means that Graduate Competence Standard can be utilized as the test specifications of National Examination.
There were several findings in this research concerning to answer two research questions as follows. First, after conducting analysis to obtain
information of the content validity on the test items, it was found that the test items including listening and reading test items are 98.8 incorporated
inGraduate Competence Standard and Competence StandardBasic Competence. Second, the results of analyzing the authenticity of National Examination listening
81 test items year 2012 show that the listening and reading test items are authentic
but the test items still need improvement. It reaches 79.5 as the percentages of the authenticity.
The listening and reading test items cannot reach the higher scale of authenticity since most of the reading passages failed to meet natural language as
one of the authenticity indicators stated by Brown 2004. Besides, most of the passages used in the reading test face linguistic problems like typographical
mistakes in reading materials, lexis, morphemes, word orders and grammar syntactic matters, diction, and meaning semantic matters. Besides, there is a
passage which is irrelevant for senior high school students since the text uses special terms for electrical installation. According to the findings, it implies that
the English test items of National Examination year 2012 need evaluation and improvement. Moreover, it is prepared to be a selection tool to Indonesian state
universities. The researcher admits that this study needs some improvement and to be
explored deeper especially for authenticity analysis and the instruments used. The checklists should be composed and developed more specific, particularly for the
five indicators used in the checklists. Moreover, it will be better if the researcher consults some language consultants concerning the naturality of language used in
the test texts used in the reading section and the dialogues and monologues used in the listening section. In this study, the researcher has not consulted the analysis
concerning to the naturality of language used in the test texts due to time constraints. Therefore, this study needs to be more explored.
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B. Recommendations
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