PUTTING THE PENCIL DOWN: SELECTED ISSUES OF WEB-BASED LANGUAGE TESTING

Over the recent decades, similarly to other areas of language teaching and learning, information technologies in general have been exercising still greater influence on all aspects of language testing, including test construction, item writing, test administration, scoring, data analysis, as well as related research interests. With the advent of web-based tests (WBTs) and a number of freely available testing solutions, moreover, test construction, administration and evaluation have become manageable even for those teachers and other test creators possessing little or no strictly technical (such as web-programming) skills.

What is more, it is almost unthinkable nowadays that a major university or a renowned testing institution would not include computer-assisted language testing into its everyday practices. At the same time, consequently, traditional paper-based tests are simply beginning to look obsolete and inefficient. In such a boom of online technologies and electronic tools in professional testing environment, with a plethora of ready-made solutions available for both teachers and testers, it is however necessary to adopt a rather critical standpoint in order to review the commonly applied testing procedures as well as assess the quality and efficiency of online language testing as such. Only by adhering to a broad conceptual view, we believe, it is possible to investigate and correctly adjust the underlying processes, so that the testing units could be beneficial and assist either the teacher or the learner.

This paper outlines a number of issues of web-based language testing which we deem crucial for the construction and administration of quality online tests, including WBT-specific considerations of validity and reliability, web-based and paper-based test comparability, and evaluation of the latest advances in WBT technology. The theoretical points presented in the paper are further compared to and validated by a few research datasets based on a series of small-scale investigations conducted at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. This data include information on teacher and student views and attitudes towards WBTs as well as results of item analysis of a considerable number of tests currently in use in the faculty LMS system. All in all, the data examined offer interesting insights into the broad area of web-based language testing and pinpoint several issues which should be focused on in the further development of WBT methods and procedures.