著者

飯村 英樹

出版者

全国英語教育学会

雑誌

ARELE : annual review of English language education in Japan (ISSN:13448560)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.22, pp.361-376, 2011-03-31

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This paper presents an analysis of whether performance in multiple-choice (MC) listening tests is influenced by the way in which questions and options are presented. We developed four test formats and analyzed the performance of our study participants-219 Japanese university students-having taken different formats of the tests. The results of the study demonstrated that the way in which questions were presented significantly affected test-taker performance-listeners performed better when questions were presented in writing rather than verbally. The second part of this study examined which characteristics of a test item (text, question, and options) were related to item difficulty in the context of our different test formats. Our results indicated that text-related variables (infrequent vocabulary, lexical diversity, word familiarity, grammatical complexity, text length, and speaker's role) were significantly correlated with item difficulty regardless of which test format was used and that task-processing variables (explicitness of question, necessary information, and lexical overlap between text and questions) were significantly correlated with specific formats. The implications of these findings on test validity are discussed.