Grammar Assessment

Dr. Mohammad Shuaib Asiri delivered a presentation titled Comparing Multiple Choice, Verb Conjugation, and Error Correction in Grammar ‎‎Assessment at a Language Research Center seminar held on October 24, 2018. His presentation was about his research in grammar assessment. Dr. Asiri first compared selected-response tasks with constructed task formats. He identified the negative outcomes of the former. In his research, he said, he had chosen three types of tasks used in grammar assessment: Multiple choice, verb conjugation, and error correction. His research questions were about task formats’ correlation with the measurement of grammatical ability, performance on task formats relationship with strategy use and their correlation with the elicitation of answer explanation. Dr. Asiri conducted his research on 106 intermediate-level students. He explained in detail the findings of his research questions. Dr. Asiri concluded that multiple choice tasks differ significantly from verb conjugation and error correction tasks in measuring grammatical ability in terms of whether they reflect learners’ ability to recognize a rule or produce something on their own. The use of strategies, he added, varies across three tasks mentioned above in terms of test management and test-wiseness. There is a positive correlation, he said, between the difficulty involved in tasks and answer explanation. He recommended there be more constructed tasks than selected-response ones so that proper learning takes place, and task formats, he emphasized, must be incorporated with language skills. The seminar was very interactive and an overall success. Date: 10/24/2018 Source: Mohammad Adil Siddique