Abstract:

Diagnostic assessment (DA) is one of the four different approaches of evaluation of students’ knowledge and skill, and it gained interest in the last two decades in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field. The formative, summative, benchmark (interim), and diagnostic assessment methods serve to a comprehensive assessment purpose to improve learners individual study gaps and create opportunities for a personalized study plan. In accordance with Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory that an individual who learns a second language gains control and regulates the tasks after exploring ways of mediating an activity through integration, this formative tool helps determine learners’ strengths and weaknesses and provides feedback on their learning need. Diagnosing an individual’s second learning issues and providing sophisticated guidance through DA test agrees with the Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal (ZPD) theory. A second language learner may benefit the support of study plan after individually taking DA test.

The Online Diagnostic Assessments (ODA) system is a webbased formative assessment tool that provides individualized feedback on students’ performance in reading and listening comprehension skills along with grammar assessment. The ODA system evaluates the students’ proficiency level and provides formative feedback on their needs to make progress toward the next higher level. The system incorporates constructedresponse type questions, and the students’ typedin answers are captured by the system for instant machine scoring in twenty languages. ODA focuses on four areas; comprehension, lexicon, syntax, and discourse to provide the learners with an immediate individualized diagnostic profile. Online Diagnostic Assessment tool assesses language abilities ranging from ILR skill levels 1 to 3. Online Diagnostic Assessment adapts to learners’ performance and moves up or down. It determines and verifies floor and ceiling levels. After collecting diagnostic data, it generates an individualized diagnostic profile and keeps history.

Educational benefits define the learning that is likely to occur as a result of the information that has been shared:
(1) Teachers and curriculum developers will have knowledge about the most common errors in Turkish/Arabic listening. This knowledge will help them to focus on the most difficult aspect of listening comprehension.
(2) Teachers and educators around the world will have been introduced to a freely available, webbased formative assessment tool. The ODA system covers ILR proficiency levels at 1, 1+, 2, 2+, and 3.
(3) The ODA system also offers the same assessment tools for languages like Korean, Chinese, Russian, PersianFarsi, Spanish, Dari and Tagalog, and the list is expanding to include Brazilian Portuguese, French, Pashto, Urdu, Iraqi, and Levantine.

Keywords:

Diagnostic Assessment, Online Diagnostic Assessment, Autonomous Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Individualized Feedback, Formative Assessment.