Functions of Language Tests

1. In learning – used to measure students’ ability, to discover how much they have been learning, to diagnose student’s strengths and weaknesses and to motivate students in learning.

a.       periodic quizzes and tests achievement

b.      language proficiency

c.       placement and diagnostic reasons

2. In teaching – means to ensure effective teaching, to improve teaching quality to obtain feedback on student learning
3. In research – potentially important role in all basic and applied research related to the nature of language proficiency, language processing, language acquisition, language attrition and language teaching.

Purpose of Assessment

1. Assessment for Learning – focuses on the desired goal. This can be achieved through processes such as sharing criteria with learners, effective questioning and feedback.

Learners learn best when:

1. They understand clearly
2. They are given feedback
3. They are given advice
4. They are fully involved

2. Assessment as learning – reflecting on evidence of learning. Through this, learners become more aware of what they learn, how they learn and what helps them learn.

3. Assessment of learning – involves working with the range of available evidence that enables staff and the wider assessment community to check on students’ progress and using this information in a number of ways. Judgement about students’ learning need to be dependable, meaning valid and reliable.

Assessment and Evaluation Principles

Planning for student assessment and evaluation:

1. They should be planned, continuous activities which are derived from curriculum objectives and consistent with the instructional and learning strategies.

2. A variety of assessment and evaluation techniques should be used.

3. Teachers should communicate assessment and evaluation strategies and plan in advance, informing the students of the objectives and the assessment procedures relative to the objective.

4. Assessment and evaluation should be fair and equitable.

5. Assessment and evaluation should help students.

6. Assessment and evaluation data and results should be communicated.

7. Use the data gathered during assessment as the basis for an evaluation.

Language and Literature Assessment: Key Concept

Assessment – the act of gathering information on a daily basis in order to understand individual student’s learning needs.

“In the context of language teaching and learning, assessment refers to the act of collecting information making judgement about a language learner’s knowledge of a language and ability to use it.”

Testing – procedures that are based on tests. In learning it is a salient part of assessment.

Language Testing – the practice and study of evaluating the proficiency of an individual in using a particular language effectively.

Measurement – testing that result in quantitative data such as attendance, records, questionnaires, teacher ratings of students, etc.

Evaluation – the culmination act of interpreting the information gathered for the purpose of making decisions or judgement about student’ learning and needs, often at reporting time. It forms as part of assessment.

Social Interaction Perspective

All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language. But a child growing up in Japan speaks Japanese whereas the same child brought up in California would speak English, so the environment is also crucial. Thus there is no question about whether heredity or environment is involved in language, or even whether one or the other is "more important." Instead, language acquisition might be our best hope of finding out how heredity and environment interact. We know that adult language is intricately complex, and we know that children become adults. Therefore something in the child's mind must be capable of attaining that complexity. Any theory that posits too little innate structure, so that its hypothetical child ends up speaking something less than a real language, must be false. The same is true for any theory that posits too much innate structure, so that the hypothetical child can acquire English but not, say, Bantu or Vietnamese.


And not only do we know about the output of language acquisition, we know a fair amount about the input to it, namely, parent's speech to their children.


Language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language. Interestingly, babies achieve these feats before they produce or understand words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. That is, they cannot be listening for the difference in sound between a word they think means bit and a word they think means beet, because they have learned neither word. They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language.


Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them. Words are usually produced in isolation; this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. Children's first words are similar all over the planet. About half the words are for objects: food (juice, cookie, body parts (eye, nose), clothing (diaper, sock), vehicles (car, boat), toys (doll, block), household items (bottle, light, animals (dog, kitty), and people (dada, baby). There are words for actions, motions, and routines, like (up, off, open, peekaboo, eat, and go, and modifiers, like hot, allgone, more, dirty, and cold. Finally, there are routines used in social interaction, like yes, no, want, bye-bye, and hi -- a few of which, like look at that and what is that, are words in the sense of memorized chunks, though they are not single words for the adult. Children differ in how much they name objects or engage in social interaction using memorized routines, though all children do both.
Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence and primitive syntax begins, with two-word strings like the following:


     All dry.            All messy.          All wet.
     I sit.              I shut.                  No bed.
     No pee.             See baby.           See pretty.
     More cereal.        More hot.           Hi Calico.
     Other pocket.       Boot off.           Siren by.
     Mail come.          Airplane allgone.   Bybebye car.
     Our car.            Papa away.          Dry pants.


Our car. Papa away. Dry pants. Children's two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures. Everywhere, children announce when objects appear, disappear, and move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and where. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered. Even before they put words together, babies can comprehend a sentence using its syntax.


Between the late two's and mid-three's, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly, sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday. 


It is safe to say that except for constructions that are rare, predominantly used in written language, or mentally taxing even to an adult, all parts of all languages are acquired before the child turns four through what they usually hear and eventually processed as regular conditional stimuli.

Physiological Principles

Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue.

In the light of Darwinian evolution theory, most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified for the demands of speech. Our larynxes are low in our throats, and our vocal tracts have a sharp right angle bend that creates two independently-modifiable resonant cavities (the mouth and the pharynx or throat) that defines a large two-dimensional range of vowel sounds. Around 6-7 million years ago, the human vocal tract can be compared to the chimpanzees but this does not mean that humans evolved directly from chimpanzees, both derived from common ancestor. After the split off from the lineage, language evolved in the human for two reasons: our ancestors developed technology and knowledge of the local environment in their lifetimes, and were involved in extensive reciprocal cooperation. This leaves about 300,000 generations in which language could have evolved gradually.

The maturation of language circuits during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language acquisition.

Before birth, virtually all the neurons (nerve cells) are formed, and they migrate into their proper locations in the brain. But head size, brain weight, and thickness of the cerebral cortex (gray matter), where the synapses (junctions) subserving mental computation take place, continue to increase rapidly in the year after birth. Long-distance connections (white matter) are not complete until nine months, and they continue to grow their speed-inducing myelin insulation throughout childhood. Synapses continue to develop, peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending on the brain region), at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult. Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine to ten months, and soon exceeds it, peaking around the age of four. In addition, huge numbers of neurons die in utero, and the dying continues during the first two years before leveling off at age seven. Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence, when the brain's metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Perhaps linguistic milestones like babbling, first words, and grammar require minimum levels of brain size, long-distance connections, or extra synapses, particularly in the language centers of the brain.

Similarly, one can conjecture that these changes are responsible for the decline in the ability to learn a language over the lifespan. The language learning circuitry of the brain is more plastic in childhood; children learn or recover language when the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged or even surgically removed (though not quite at normal levels), but comparable damage in an adult usually leads to permanent aphasia (Curtiss, 1989; Lenneberg, 1967). Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology, giving rise to what we call a "foreign accent." Their development often fossilizes into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. There are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching, and plain talent.

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is one of the central topics of the broader science of cognition and focuses on the process by which human acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related.

Every time we speak we are revealing something about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity.

Nonetheless, learning a first language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years and without the need for formal lessons. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

Sub-discipline of Applied Linguistics

Computational Linguistics -  interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural languagefrom a computational perspective.

Forensic Linguistics - is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure.

Internet Linguistics - It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other New Media, such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging.

Language Acquisition - the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate.

Language Assessment - focuses on the assessment of first, second or other language in the school, college, or university context; assessment of language use in the workplace; and assessment of language in the immigration, citizenship, and asylum contexts.

Language Development - a process starting early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. 

Language Education - is the teaching and learning of a language. It can include improving a learner's mastery of her or his native language, but the term is more commonly used with regard to second language acquisition, which means the learning of a foreign or second language.

Language Prescription - normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct.

Linguistic Anthropology -  an interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life.

Neurolinguistics - he study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.

Psycholinguistics - the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language.

Definition of Applied Linguistics

An interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. This branch of Linguistics has been associated with Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages , Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Teaching English as a Second Language and generally answers how can languages be learnt and taught, what social factors affect language learning, how can technology be used to contribute to the effectiveness of language teaching/learning, what are the related problems associated with language disorders and can this be prevented.