Designing an ESL Assessment Test for Intermediate Students

As with all forms of testing, language testing performs a variety of roles, from representing levels of performance to social gatekeeping functions (McNamara, 2000). This paper will present a summative test for a specific group of learners in context. Moreover, the paper will provide the justification behind the choices made in item and task selection for the test. Hughes (2003) presents essential procedural guidelines for test construction, the first of which notes that the test purpose and type must be clearly defined. The test presented in this paper was an achievement test designed for first year Japanese polytechnic students in Kyoto, Japan, aged 18-20 who were studying English as either an elective subject or as a mandatory component of their first-year studies.