| Summary: | 碩士 === 東海大學 === 外國語文學系 === 99 === Diagnostic language testing, which aims to help test-takers better understand their own linguistic strengths and weaknesses, has received growing attention in recent research (Alderson, 2005; Jang, 2009; Knoch, 2009; Yin, 2006; Yin, Sims, & Cothran, forthcoming). Feedback to test-takers is a defining characteristic of diagnostic testing and can also be considered as part of a test’s impact (Alderson, 2005; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). Therefore, to determine the usefulness of a diagnostic test, it is essential to examine test-takers’ perceptions of the feedback provided.
This study aimed to investigate Taiwanese university students’ perceptions about test feedback of the Online English Assessment System (OEAS) Reading Test. To evaluate both how much and in what ways the feedback is deemed useful, this study adopted a two-stage mixed methods design with an aim to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The participants in this study were 54 freshmen, including 14 males and 40 females, from Tunghai University. The participants recruited were of different majors and English proficiency levels. In Stage I, 48 university students were invited to take the OEAS Reading Test and each of them filled in a questionnaire to rate each item’s feedback on a 5-point Likert scale according to how useful they perceived the feedback to be. In Stage II, 6 students, not involved in Stage I, took the test and then were interviewed as they read the feedback.
The computer software package SPSS 17.0 for Windows was used to organize, compute, and analyze the quantitative data from the questionnaires of this study. The findings of the study are summarized as follows. First, the results indicated that Taiwanese university students in general perceived the diagnostic reading test feedback to be fairly useful. Second, students considered the Chinese and the English feedback to be equally important but they tended to read the Chinese feedback first. Third, students showed commonalities in their preferences for certain types of feedback. For instance, students preferred the vocabulary list, immediate feedback, feedback with distractor explanations, and feedback with shorter length. Forth, students tended to give feedback of easier items higher usefulness ratings. That is, students regarded feedback of easier items as more useful. Fifth, high English proficiency level students held more positive attitudes towards feedback and consistently perceived feedback to be more useful than the low-level students did. In addition, a significant difference was found between the high- and low-level students’ perceptions of the general explanation of reading sub-skill 6: inference from reading.
Ultimately, the study aims to provide insights for test designers on how to construct and improve feedback on diagnostic reading tests; therefore, the implications and some suggestions for further research were provided at the end of the study.
Key words: diagnostic language test, reading, test feedback
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