Pedagogical Quality of English Achievement Tests: An Untold Story of Iranian High School Students’ Oral Scores

The test scores on students’ report cards is the only benchmark against which their English achievement are assessed for evaluative purposes in Iranian high schools. According to the rules and regulations, the average score of a student is required to be reported by English teachers, based on her/his performance on both oral and written tests. The present study aimed to discover if Iranian high school female students’ English scores on their report cards represent the real sum of their oral and written test scores. To do so, the average scores of ۳۰ female students in Grade ۱۱ at two Iranian girls’ senior high schools in Isfahan were compared with those of a researcher-made validated oral and written test. The results showed that the scores of the students on the newly-developed test were higher than those recorded on their report cards. The results of a paired t test revealed a statistically significant difference between the means of these two sets of scores, rejecting the common false presupposition about students’ low performance in oral skills. Teachers typically skipped the oral test and rated their students’ oral ability, just on the basis of their own intuition or students’ performance on the written test. It seems that the exclusion of the oral test leads to this difference in the scores. Thus, Iranian high school students’ English scores appearing on their report card are not a sound reflection of their performance on the oral and written tests.

Keywords:

English Achievement Tests , Iranian high schools , Language Assessing Quality , Students’ Oral Scores