Achievement Test

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

  1. Statement of the problem and rationale for the study

The Vietnamese Government has placed English learning and teaching high on its agenda to make sure that Vietnam will play an active role in world political and economic activities. Therefore, the Ministry of Education and Training has instituted a comprehensive reform regarding the English learning and teaching. Realizing ineffective attempts of the traditional grammatical syllabus in developing high school learners’ communicative competence, the Ministry of Education and Training has been testing a new series of English course books, which are more communicative with a wider variety of tasks and activities to improve learners’ communicative competence. The enhancement of communicative skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing is regarded as the desirable goal that the books’ authors attain to. Thanks to their communicative nature and the positive feedback from both teachers and learners using them, the Ministry of Education and Training has decided to use these pilot books as the standard course books for high school students from the coming academic year 2006 -2007.

Innovation in English teaching syllabus imposes reasonable requirements on innovation in testing and evaluation, on the grounds that “both testing and teaching are so closely interrelated that it is virtually impossible to work in either field without being constantly concerned with the other” (Heaton, 1975, p. 5). Of all tests for high school students, achievement test is considered the most important one. This type of test, particularly, has a close relation to teaching syllabus owing to its distinctive purpose. According to Hughes (1989, p.10) “achievement tests are directly related to language courses, their purpose being to establish how successful individual students, groups of students, or the courses themselves have been achieving objectives”.

The question of whether current...