DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF AN ENGLISH WRITING TEST AT A UNIVERSITY IN VIETNAM

Abstract

This study was conducted in an attempt to replace the writing component of an Olympic English test battery at a Vietnamese university. After the test was developed with reference to Bachman and Palmer’s test construction model, it was administered to 18 participants at the university. The scripts were then independently marked by two raters, and the scores were used as evidence to determine construct validity and scoring validity of the test and test procedures. The Pearson correlation test was employed to check internal consistency of the test and scoring consistency between the raters. Correlation coefficients R = 0.72 and R = 0.94 suggested that the two test tasks well reflected the writing ability construct defined in the test, and R = 0.43 indicated both an intersection and a discrimination in the content and difficulty level of the test tasks. Inter-rater reliability was recorded at a satisfactory level (R = 0.74), but this value could have been enhanced with more strict marking guidelines applied to problematic scripts.