Babel placement test

I am happy to offer, as an Open Source project, the Babel Placement Test. You may use the test for whatever you like, you may alter it, edit it and even burn it if you like, see: creativecommons.org -Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

The Babel English Language Placement Test was closely based on the Nelson Quickcheck Placement Tests. These have generally been used for base-line language assessment of company employees in order to benchmark their language level against an established external reference [the ALTE and CEF levels]. They have been used at Liverpool City Council, A4E Language and Basic Skills Training, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and subsidiaries, Chevron Texaco, Liverpool and Everton Football Teams, IdioMaster (Spain), and Liverpool Language Academy. The testing cycle should require no more than 70 minutes of trainee time and does not require any specialist testers to administer it.

This placement test has been thoroughly trialled and edited and retrailled. It thas been benchmarked using standard correlation statistical methods to IELTS and Cambridge testing suite tests. This gives some assurance regarding level benchmarks.

In addition, the test has undergone stringent facility value statistical calculations and assures a wide spread of scores from beginner levels to advanced students. A large population sample (some 5000 tests carried out) gives some assurance of reliability of these calculations.

These calculations have been automatised using standard QuestionMark© testing software.

Description

The test consists of four sections of ascending difficulty. Each section contains 25 questions with reading, grammatical & lexical items. Each section is in ascending difficulty.

The test should last one hour. Learners will have to work fast in order to complete the test. This is deliberate: competent language users always display some degree of automaticity, and this is an intended feature of the test.

It is important for test users to understand that the Babel English Language Placement Test is not a level or proficiency test. Not only does it not test lanuage skills in a direct sense, but it samples only one hour’s of language. It does not aim to directly test skills or “can do” statements in terms of language performance. It does however provide a robust means of establishing the most probable level of language performance.

After initial placement in teaching groups, learners may be moved up or down a level within the first week of the course in the light of observed language performance. This is standard procedure in most language training establishments.

Intended uses of the test…

Quick and easy administration is one of the most important factors in successful, high volume placement testing. Generally speaking, institutions don’t like to keep learners waiting to start classes. This is, after all, a business.

We are not really interested in speaking or writing skills for placement purposes: we are more interested in whether learners can understand the teacher and read the course book, whether they have an adequate level of lexis, and whether they can handle written sentence patterns and structures with some degree of automaticity.

Content

In the first instance, the items in Babel were carefully selected and adapted from the ten levels of the Nelson English Language Tests battery. The latter ranges from near-beginner level up to UCLES Certificate of Proficiency level [that is, to near native-speaker level]. Questions which showed the highest discrimination rating were chosen in each case. In order to keep up to date with current testing methods, skill based questions were trialled, pretested, edited, benchmarked and added to the test. To date, only reading questions have been added. There are some listening questions written and ready for trialling and benchmarking, However, present resources prohibit further development.

The tests are in multiple-choice format [to ensure rapid marking] and consist of items measuring the recognition of correct responses to reading prompts, grammatical forms and lexical choices in context. All items have been extensively pre-tested with students from a variety of first-language backgrounds.

Whilst the addition of add-on test items puts the reliability and validity of the test in question, what is not possible to do is to adapt or change questions, question order or rewrite questions and maintain test reliability. This is because each distractor, question and section is designed to work as one measuring instrument. Benchmark calculation was carried out on this basis and the test will lose reliability if changes are made.

Validity

The Babel English Language Placement Tests are accurate, although they do not provide the same degree of precision in placement as the individual tests of the larger NELT or other CAT battery. For our purposes, however, they will suffice to indicate accurately the general language level of testees. They do not enable statements to be made about individual skills [reading, writing, listening or speaking].

For more information, go to the test’s own page.

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