towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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ability." 2 Subjective tests, on the other hand, are intended
to assess "the appropriateness of the use of the language," 3
he suggests, while pointing out that "appropriateness cannot
yet be reduced to rules and consequently judgements about it are
necessarily subjective." 4
Again, tests may be categorized according to a more
specific purpose. Achievement tests, Proficiency tests,
Aptitude
tests, Placement tests and Diagnostic tests all have their own
particular validity, and it is the last of these with which we
are concerned. We want to know the areas in which our students
are regularly having difficul ty. At the UFPB we.have noted that one
of these areas is in comprehension of written texts associated
with the students' own disciplines, so we require a testing
instrument that will indicate exactly where the difficulty lies.
Comprehension is a broad category and there are a number of
methods of testing
it. Cloze procedure, for example, which
operates by the deletion of every
(e.g.) 5th word from a text,
can be used to measure the students' ability to infer what the
missing words are by reference to the context. The
limitations
of this approach, for our purposes at least, are pointed out by
Raphael
Gefen:
"The only limitation at the moment... is that
the missing item is still at word level and
no higher; to omit longer units such as
phrases would introduce too many complications
in the objective Cor at least 'agreed')
scoring of a foreign language test." 5
The students' knowledge of how two or more words may come
together
to form a ngp would be only rarely tested by this procedure,
and
we are, of course, concerned with ngps of two or more
words.