AUTHENTICITY
Authenticity can mean the degree of closeness of the test tasks to the real-life tasks in the target language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996: 23). Regarding the features, Brown and Abeywickrama (2010: 37) mention that authentic assessment:
1. contains language that is as natural as possible
2. has items that are contextualized rather than isolated
3. includes meaningful, relevant, interesting topics
4. provides some thematic organization to items, such as through a story line or episode
5. offers tasks that replicate real-world tasks
An example of natural language in an oral interaction can be seen in the following dialog.
A. What’s your name?
B. Suho
C. Where are you from?
D. Seoul
In such a dialog, sometimes a teacher requires his/her student to answer the above questions using complete sentences, such as in the following.
A. What’s your name?
B. My name is Suho
C. Where are you from?
D. I am from Seoul
The complete answers made by B in this example do not reflect the natural English as used by the native speaker. For authentic assessment we have to use natural English, as required in CLT method.
An example of contextual test is when we test vocabulary. Rather than asking:
- Write the meaning of “trivial”
it is better to have the following item:
- “The students think that the test is difficult, but the teacher regards it as trivial.” The underlined word means ....
The first item uses isolated word, but the second item is contextualized, and helps the test-takers find the answer. Another example of contextual test item is when a teacher asks:
- Sujin, if you meet your teacher in a super-market at 7 p.m., how would
you greet him/her?
A test item should be meaningful. An example of meaningful item is as follows:
Teacher : Jinho, a friend of yours, Suhee held a birthday party last week. Actually, you wanted to come, but she did not invite you. What would you say when you meet her?
The expected answer for this item is: “If you had invited me, I would have come.”
The following example is not meaningful.
Teacher : Repeat after me. “Dongjun and Ree study English.” Students : Dongjun and Ree study English.
Teacher : Change to “past”.
Students : Dongjun and Ree studied English.
Teacher : Change to “continuous”.
Students : Dongjun and Ree are studying English.
In this example, the drill is not meaningful, because even though the students can use past form and continuous form correctly, they may not know how and when to use the sentence forms. A teacher often focuses on form rather than on meaning; therefore, this drill is not meaningful.
The next feature of authenticity is thematic organization of assessment. Rather than using unconnected sentences to assess the use of tenses, it is better to use a passage or story, which can provide context for the use of certain tense form.
The last feature of authenticity is that a test task should imitate real-life task. A dicto-comp is an example of real-life task, because in dicto-comp students are asked to hear something told by the teacher while the students take notes, and then they rewrite what has been told to them. This practice imitates the real-life, where a secretary takes note the instruction told to him/her, and then rewrite what is expected from the instruction. Another example of real-life feature of authentic assessment is a reading test whose text is selected from current issues adopted or adapted from newspapers, magazines, brochures, etc.