This book is a great helper if you want to dig deeper into testing and assessment. It explains the qualities of tests: validity, reliability, practicality, and beneficial effects testing can have on teaching and learning. The book will shade light on testing 4 basic skills, as well as grammar and vocabulary. There is also a chapter on testing young learners. Abundant use of examples and recommendations on further reading are provided.

Contents: 15 chapters devoted to various aspects of testing, plus three appendixes.

This book turned out to be my favourite out of all I read during Delta preparation. I have never thought about testing that much before. It helped me start analyzing tests provided by coursebooks and modify some of them to achieve better results. We also fine-tuned our placement and diagnostic tests at school.

Below you will find some personal eye-openers which struck me while reading.

If your aim is to deliver a listening test, you shouldn’t mark students down for any spelling mistakes as they are an indicator or writing abilities.

Likewise, a writing test should test only writing ability and nothing else. A writing task often requires a student to demonstrate their creativity, imagination or just wide general knowledge. Ideally, all of those should be minimized in testing and scoring.

Everybody’s favourite multiple-choice tests, which are easy to administer and check, are at the same time extremely hard to create as you need to think of proper distractors.

A vital thing about teaching and testing is the backwash effect, also known as the washback. This is the effect of testing on teaching and learning preceding the test. In other words, if we prepare students for an exam just by doing innumerous sample tests, the washback will probably be negative as some areas of the language will be neglected. I used to be ‘teaching for the test’ when I just started my teaching career, so this concept is something I need to remind myself of.

There is a concept of face validity which is how much the test appears to be ‘a good test’ for learners, parents and teachers. It’s not a scientific notion, yet it can be very important. For instance, lots of people still think that dictation is a great way of testing students’ English ability, though there are many better options. We should bear face validity in mind while talking to parents and teaching students.

We usually get more than we need to interpret a message. This is called redundancy. Native speakers can cope well when this redundancy is reduced -- for instance, when there is some background noise or the newspaper they are reading was left in the rain. When we try to measure students’ overall ability, tests are often based on reduced redundancy.

You need this book if: you want to place your students to proper groups; you are not happy about the tests provided by coursebooks and would like to fine-tune them; you feel like you are ‘teaching for the test’ and want to change your teaching practices.