An Examination of Language Achievement Tests Administered in Primary Education

Problem Statement: Testing student performance during the teaching process is one of the resposibilities of language teacher. Tests may have harmful or beneficial effects on teaching and learning. Language tesing requires testing different skills and therefore, it is more complicated than testing for other subject areas presented in schools. On the other hand, an achievement test is very important for education purposes, because, in addition to evaluating student performance, it has additional aims such as finding the areas of difficulty or providing students with the details of their performance. Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this study was to examine the language tests prepared for the primary education system in Turkey. The study also aims to determine the language skills that are considered important by language teachers in language tests as wall as the distribution of language skills and elements in tests. Method. A descriptive research was performed in this study. Sixteen schools in Diyarbakir, Turkery, were chosesn as samples. The instruments included a questionnaire prepared by the researcher and achievement test papers administered to the 8(th) grade studens attending the sample schools. Thirty teacher answered the questionnaire and 55 test papers were examined. Findings and Results: The results in indicated that grammar is the most frequently tested element in language tets followed by vocabulary. Language skills, especially listening and speaking, are generally neglected. Conclusions and Recommendations: The examples presented in this study show that teacher in primary schools tend to test grammar and vocabulary instead of language skills. To help the language teacher improve their testing skills, in-service testing courses could be prepared by institutions or by the Ministry of Education. In addition, teachers may be provided with booklets giving practical information about test preparation or a Web page can be prepared with explanations and sample test papers.