Investigating the Consistency between Rule Recognition Tasks and Language Production Tasks in Testing Grammatical Ability

Abstract:Different testing tasks are used to measure the learners’ awareness of English language grammar. These tasks can be classified into mainly two types: tasks that test the recognition of the correct language structures and tasks that test the ability to produce acceptable language forms. This research applied an empirical approach to measure the consistency between rule recognition tasks and language production tasks in testing English language grammar. It also aims to shed light on the validity and reliability of these testing tasks as means for testing grammatical ability. The author used a split-half exam to test a group of 30 students. Half of the exam consisted of rule recognition items while the other half consisted of language production items. The correlation between the scores of the two halves was calculated and the results were very consistent. The results suggest that both of the two methods can give a clear evaluation of the learners’ grammatical ability.