Validating Achievement Tests of the English Course: The Use of the English Part

Abstract

This study advocates for the central quality of the language tests and their validity and aims to investigate the content validity of the use of the English part of the achievement tests administered to the first- and second-year students of General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania. The tests were given in the form of the final examination of the English language course in order to find out if the papers’ content corresponded to the descriptors of the European language levels specified in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the Europass on which the course syllabus was based. Seeking to examine the content validity, the study analyses the papers in terms of the task types and linguistic – grammatical and lexical – knowledge tested. The analyses of the papers revealed that although both open and semi-open tasks and closed tasks were present in the papers and specifications, the former were dominating for being more effective. Some of the papers lacked certain grammatical and lexical aspects to be tested which were mentioned in the specifications, such as pronouns, relative clauses, conditional clauses, modals, derivatives and collocations. The syntactic competence was tested in all the papers. As a result, the content validity of these papers can be partially supported, though in a general view, it can be inferred that the papers had the content validity, i.e. they measured what is supposed to be measured. Therefore, these findings suggest that the content of the achievement tests might be revised and may contribute to further research of validity in language testing.