A Trial Study Of Designing An Oral Language Test For Nursing Students Through A Task-Based Approach

This dissertation is an account of the development of a task-based English proficiency oral test for clinical nurses in hospital. The test content has been established on the basis of needs analysis. Data about English needs and the work environment was collected by means of a staff questionnaire, observations and informal interviews. Test specifications were written and used as a basis for the test design. In this test, both analytic and holistic scoring methods are adopted. The assessment is made by paired examiners:The language teacher gives a detailed analytic scale while the Nursing specialist is responsible for the holistic scale. In order to find out the feasibility of the task-based test, the author gave a three months' oral training to 40 nursing students in the Third Military University. After three months' task-based oral English training, a task-based oral test was carried out among the nursing students. In order to assess face validity, the candidates were asked for the feedback after completing the test. Test results were collected and compared using the SPSS package. Inter-marker reliability is examined too. Through this small scale trial administration, we found that the task-based oral language test is valid, reliable and practical. The study also shows that the reliability of a specialized English test can be increased trough paired scoring. Difficulties in interpreting the test scores are discussed and recommendations for test improvement of similar program are also made.