Master of pedagogy, Ibrayeva E.S., student of pedagogical faculty, Sultan A.

Buketov Karaganda State University

Features of assessment in English for Specific Purposes

Assessment in English for specific purposes (ESP) is in principle no different from other areas of language assessment. Language assessment practitioners must take account of test purpose, test taker characteristics, and the target language use situation. All language assessment specialists adhere to accepted principles of measurement, including providing evidence for test reliability, validity, and impact. Finally, professional language testers are bound by international standards of ethics which require, among other considerations, respect for the humanity and dignity of test takers, not knowingly allowing the misuse of test scores, and considering the effects of their tests on test takers, teachers, score users, and society in general. ESP assessment is held to these same principles. The traditional needs analysis in ESP covers the purpose of the assessment, the personal, educational, and knowledge characteristics of the test takers, and the context of specific purpose language use. Test developers must offer evidence that the tests they design provide consistent measurements of specific purpose language ability, that the inferences and decisions based on test performance are warranted, and that the consequences of the test are the intended ones and are beneficial for test takers. They are equally bound by professional ethical standards. If all this is true, in what ways can we reasonably distinguish assessment in ESP from other areas of language assessment? The simple answer, of course, is that ESP assessment takes place in ESP programs.

Assessment instruments are needed in specific purpose courses, as in all language programs, fi rst, to give learners an opportunity to show what they have learned and what they can do with the language they have learned by being given the same instructions and the same input under the same conditions. Tests are needed secondly to get a “ second opinion ” about students ’ progress and help confirm teachers’ own assessments and help them make decisions about students’ needs. Thirdly, tests are needed to provide for some standardization by which teachers and other stakeholders judge performance and progress, allowing for comparisons of students with each other and against performance criteria generated either within the ESP program or externally. Finally tests help to ensure that student progress is judged in the same way from one time to the next, in other words, that the assessments are reliable. These are reasons for formal testing in any language - teaching program and ESP programs are no different in their need for assessment instruments that reflect the content and methodology of the courses, which we assume are themselves based on an analysis of the target language use situation. Traditionally, ESP courses and assessments have been contrasted with “general English ” courses and assessments, though this distinction has been somewhat blurred in recent years, particularly since the publication of Bachman and Palmer ’ s book, Language Testing in Practice [1]. All language tests require the developers to define the purpose of the test, conduct a needs analysis, collect language use data in context, analyze the target communicative tasks and language, and develop test tasks that reflect the target tasks. ESP assessment instruments are usually defined fairly narrowly to reflect a specific area of language use such as English for academic writing, English for nursing, Aviation English, or Business English, for example. Thus, ESP tests are based on our understanding of three qualities of specific purpose language: first, that language use varies with context, second, that specific purpose language is precise, and third that there is an interaction between specific purpose language and specific purpose background knowledge. With regard to contextual variation, it is well known that physicians use language differently from air traffi c controllers, university students in economics use language differently from students in chemistry, and football/soccer players use language differently on the fi eld than do ice hockey players on the rink. Furthermore, physicians use English differently when talking with other medical practitioners than when talking with patients, though both contexts would be categorized under the heading of Medical English. Cotos showed, by means of corpus analyses of published research article introductions in 50 different academic disciplines, that the discourse conventions of each discipline showed both similarities and differences across disciplines[2]. Context has been defined variously over the years, but the classic features of context proposed by Hymes are still useful today: situation, participants, ends (purposes), act sequence (organization, content), key (tone), instrumentalities (language, medium), norms of interaction, and genre [3]. The manipulation of these aspects of context in ESP tests challenge test takers to respond to differences in communicative context in ways perhaps more finely tuned than in more general language assessments. Secondly, regarding the notion that specific purpose language is precise, what outsiders refer to as unnecessary “ gobbledygook ” in academic, vocational, and technical fields, in fact reflects practitioners in those fields wishing to be more precise and accurate in their communication. Legal language, or “ legalese,” is the most- often cited example of such precision.

Although the language is this paragraph might seem unnecessarily obtuse to non - lawyers, we would suggest that the reason for its jargonish tone is the legal mind’ s desire for precision, covering all possible contingencies, and mitigating the possibility for misinterpretation or ambiguity. This is the second distinguishing feature of specific purpose language. Finally, an important distinction between assessment in ESP and assessment in other areas of language teaching/learning is the relationship between language ability and background knowledge. In traditional, non - specific purpose assessment, content, or background knowledge has often been viewed as a confounding factor, masking “ true” language ability and producing “ construct irrelevant variance.

References:

1. Douglas , D. ( 2005 ) Testing languages for specific purposes. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. 857 – 68. Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.

2. Cotos, E. ( 2011 ) Potential of automated writing evaluation feedback. CALICO Journal 28 ( 2 ): 420 – 59.

3. Hymes, D. ( 1974 ) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, PA : University of Pennsylvania Press.