| Problem. A number of studies of the language proficiency have been conducted in the field of second language teaching of English and other European languages. Many of these studies have found dictation and cloze tests to be highly reliable and valid test methods. Charles Stansfield found in his study in 1977, however, that dictation is only moderately valid when Spanish is used because of its nearly one-to-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.; Graduated dictation tests in which the test text is presented gradually from a very short segment, e.g., one word, to a comparatively long segment, e.g., 22 words, were developed by Lin and Cziko as modified dictation. In their separate studies conducted in 1981, Lin and Cziko both found that this method (including the copytest which presents the test text visually instead of auditorily) was highly valid when English was used.; The author of the current study hypothesized that the graduated dictation test and the copytest would be valid test methods for Japanese whose orthography and pronunciation are closely related as in Spanish.; Procedure. The experiment was conducted during the fall semester of 1985 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Seventy-eight subjects were randomly selected from students in the beginning, intermediate, and advanced Japanese classes, students who had taken advanced Japanese previously, and native speakers of Japanese. The subjects were divided into four groups, and each group took graduated dictation tests and copytests prepared by the author. They also took the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Japanese Proficiency Test, which consisted of listening and reading comprehension tests, and an oral interview test based on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency test.; Conclusion. The scores on the graduated dictation tests and the copytests were correlated with those of the other tests. It was found that both the graduated dictation test and the copytest were highly reliable and valid methods of testing Japanese proficiency. Two scoring methods, the exact- and the acceptable-scoring methods, and two scoring units, the word-by-word and chunk scoring units, were seen to be highly valid. |
