Standards for language assessment: demystifying university-level English placement testing in China

ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing discussions on quality and professionalism in the field of language assessment, limited empirical research is currently available on whether language testing practice conforms to the best practice model prescribed in professional standards. Situated in the context of Chinese higher education, this study examined how English placement tests are developed, implemented and used, and explored the social and contextual factors that shaped different aspects of placement testing practice. A mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was employed to collect the research data. Findings suggest the lack of quality control procedures in placement testing practice, thus raising legitimate concerns over the reliability, validity, and indeed the overall usefulness of English placement tests for College English (CE) teaching programmes. Several factors featured prominently in the qualitative data which affected placement testing practice, including time pressure, a lack of policy and financial support from relevant administrative departments, stakeholders’ lack of language assessment literacy (LAL), and students’ cheating behaviours. Through investigating these aspects of English placement testing practice, this study highlights the crucial roles of professional standards in language testing practice and the importance of understanding the social dimensions of language assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional standards
• English placement test
• testing practice
• language assessment literacy

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 40th Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) held at the University of Auckland in July 2018. We would like to thank Ute Knoch, Angela McKenna and the two APJE reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback on the previous draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A C-test usually consists of one or more stand-alone short texts. For each text, from the second sentence onward, each second word is “mutilated” by deleting the second half of its letters. Students are required to restore the missing part of each “mutilated” word (e.g., Harsch & Hartig, 2016).

2. In China, a two-tier system of universities was instituted by the government at the end of the 20^th Century. National key universities are under the direct management of the Ministry of Education, whereas provincial key universities under the management of provincial or municipal governments. Compared with non-key universities, key universities receive a higher level of support from the government.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason Fan

Jason Fan is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC), University of Melbourne, Australia. Before moving to Australia in August 2018, he was an Associate Professor at College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, China. His research interests include the validation of language assessments and research methods. He is the author of Development and Validation of Standards in Language Testing (Fudan University Press, 2018) and the co-author (with Tim McNamara and Ute Knoch) of Fairness, Justice and Language Assessment (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Yan Jin

Yan Jin is a professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is currently Chair of the National College English Testing Committee and Deputy Chair of the National College Foreign Languages Teaching Steering Committee. She is also co-president of the Asian Association for Language Assessment. Her research focuses on the development and validation of large-scale language tests. She is co-editor-in-chief of the Springer open-access journal Language Testing in Asia and is on the editorial boards of Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Classroom Discourse, The International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, Asia TEFL, and a number of academic journals published in China.