Doctoral Degrees (English)
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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by Subject "Constitutive"
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Item Open Access Transparency, accessibility and accountability as regulative conditions for a postgraduate test of academic literacy(University of the Free State, 2012-01) Rambiritch, Avasha; Weideman, A. J.; Brokensha, S. I.English: This study is concerned with transparency, accessibility and accountability as regulative conditions for a postgraduate test of academic literacy. What it will propose to do is investigate how these can be incorporated into the design of one test, the Test of Academic Literacy for Postgraduate Students (TALPS), and theoretically accounted for in terms of a framework. A main focus is to show that the questions raised here about the social dimension of language testing cannot be adequately answered by experts in the field like Messick (1989b; 1996), Bachman and Palmer (1996), and Kunnan (2000; 2004). Instead these questions can be answered in a “third idea, other than validity and usefulness” (Weideman 2009a: 239), as outlined by Weideman, an idea that does not foreground one concept but rather identifies a number of fundamental considerations for language testing. The argument here is that construct and other empirically based forms of validity are not enough to validate a language test and that what is needed, in addition, is a detailed look at issues of transparency, accessibility and accountability. This study begins by contextualising the problem of poor academic literacy and outlining the need for academic literacy tests such as the Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL) and TALPS. This is followed by an in-depth study of previous work in the field of language testing. The literature on key concepts such as validity, reliability, accessibility, transparency and accountability is surveyed as well. An important part of this study is telling the story of TALPS from its initial conceptualisation to its final implementation. Included in this is a detailed study of the reliability and validity of the test, taking the form of a validation argument. Subsequent chapters (5, 6 and 7) focus specifically on issues of transparency, accessibility and accountability as they relate to TALPS. This study would not be complete without the voices of the test takers. A detailed summary of the data collected from a questionnaire administered to students who wrote TALPS is offered as well. The questionnaire has been designed to elicit information, comments, questions and reactions from the testees about the test. The final chapter in this study will attempt to provide a summary of the answers to the important questions that have been asked and answered in the course of this investigation. It will also consider the link between transparency, accessibility and accountability, and will focus briefly on other conditions in the framework that contribute to the design of fair and socially acceptable tests. This study hopes to make a contribution to the field of language testing by concentrating on an area of testing that has been largely ignored – the social dimension. One of the aims of this study is to show the complementarity among the empirical, social and ethical dimensions of TALPS. It therefore provides a framework that incorporates a concern for the empirical analyses of a test as well as a concern for the social dimensions of language testing. Test developers are challenged to consider important questions related to every aspect of the test, leading to the design of fair, accessible tests that are designed by test developers who are willing to be accountable for their designs.