Presenter: Dr. Gary Ockey
A four skills, listening, reading, writing, and speaking, approach to assessing and reporting language ability has been prevalent for decades. More recently, however, a number of factors have led to the need to reconsider this paradigm. Possibly the most important of these factors is the move toward the use of more authentic language test tasks, ones that have characteristics which correspond to those of a language use task that test takers might be expected to complete in a real world context. This move toward authentic tasks has had the knock-on effect of an increased use of interactive and integrated test tasks, which may measure constructs of language ability that do not align with the four skills paradigm.
In this workshop, the interactive integrated tasks used in the Iowa State English Placement Test (https://apling.engl.iastate.edu/english-placement-test) will be introduced to participants, who will then have an opportunity to create similar tasks based on their own contexts. The task creation will be embedded in a construct (Bachman and Palmer, 2010) and instructional validity (Pellegrino, DiBello, & Goldman 2016) framework for test development. The workshop will conclude with discussion of the use of spoken dialog systems acting as a conversational partner to make interactive tasks more feasible.
Gary Ockey, (M.A., University of Utah, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is an Associate Professor at Iowa State University. He investigates second language assessments, with a focus on the use of technology and quantitative methods to better measure oral communication (listening and speaking). He recently led the development of the Iowa State University oral communication placement test, an example of a test which combines strengths of humans and computers for test delivery and scoring. His co-authored book: Emerging issues in the assessment of second language listening, is expected to be published by John Benjamins in 2018. He has published in various journals, including Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Language Assessment Quarterly,Language Testing, and Modern Language Journal. He has served as the Editor of the TOEFL Research Report Series, and is currently an associate editor of Language Assessment Quarterly.