Abstract
Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely used as a lingua franca. Thus it is seen that jumbled sentence test items can reflect real-world language use. To evaluate scrambled sentence test items, eight test item types developed from one jumbled sentence instance (“Want taxi Dubai you?”) were analyzed in terms of interactivity and authenticity. Items ranged from being completely decontextualized, non-interactive, and inauthentic to being fully contextualized, interactive, and authentic. To determine appropriate assessment standards for English tests in schools in this region, the English language standards for schools and English language requirements for university admission in the UAE were analyzed. Schools in Dubai/Sharjah use Inner Circle English varieties of English (e.g., British or American English) as the standard for evaluation, as well as non-native-English-speaker varieties (e.g., Indian English(es)). Also, students applying to English-medium universities in the UAE must meet the required scores on standardized English tests including the IELTS and TOEFL. Standards for evaluation of communication in English involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. Thus standards for classroom assessment of English in Dubai/Sharjah are determined by local schools’ and universities’ policies.
Highlights
Ockey (2009, p. 844) suggests that “in the real world, test takers may never encounter a situation in which they would be expected to rearrange groups of words into an appropriate sentence.” When I read this statement, I thought, “He’s never been in a lingua franca situation.” I walked from my office to the street where taxis were waiting, an area where people of multiple nationalities interact in English
This tension between creativity in language use and standardization in language assessment is keenly manifested in the issue of authenticity in language assessment
There were two phases to this research: identification of jumbled sentences in real-world English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication and analysis of test items developed based on the utterance “Want taxi Dubai you?
Summary
Ockey (2009, p. 844) suggests that “in the real world, test takers may never encounter a situation in which they would be expected to rearrange groups of words into an appropriate sentence.” When I read this statement, I thought, “He’s never been in a lingua franca situation.” I walked from my office to the street where taxis were waiting, an area where people of multiple nationalities interact in English. An Indian/Pakistani taxi driver came up to me and asked, “Want taxi Dubai you?” I replied, “No, thank you.”. As he walked away, I thought, “That was a jum-bled sentence.”. Language by its very nature involves variation and change as people seek to communicate, often inventing new uses of language to express ideas, concepts, feelings, events, and information. This creative communication by means of language(s) involves what Bachman and Palmer (1996) refer to as real-world target language use (TLU). This tension between creativity in language use and standardization in language assessment is keenly manifested in the issue of authenticity in language assessment. Davidson, Turner, and Huhta (1997, p. 309) point out that “[t]here is a constant tension between a desire to coordinate and control testing on the one hand and a need to recognize contextualized diversity on the other.”
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