Sessions /
Using a learner corpus to design a placement test #108

This presentation aims to demonstrate a reliable and efficient method of developing valid constructs for placement tests with the use of corpus techniques. With English medium courses at universities rising, one of the challenges for English language support programs is to determine whether and to what extent students need extra language support. A lack of resources has meant that the English Language Program at International University of Japan has relied heavily on the TOEIC ITP test to place students, but over the years this has proved unreliable. This presentation will explain how instructors at IUJ have designed the grammar component of an in-house placement test. In particular, the presenter will outline how constructs for the test were developed from three sources of data: the ability of learners at an intermediate level as derived from a learner corpus; the experience of instructors in the program; the demands of academic writing at the graduate level as based on an academic corpus. The literature on test design offers little guidance for teachers on how to use corpora to make decisions about constructs. This presentation will begin to address that gap by demonstrating how to search learner corpora and handle the language data.