Phrase structure rules are ‘formulae’ that describe a given language’s syntax. Phrase structure rules break a natural language sentence down into its constituent parts (also known as syntactic categories. Phrase structure rules are usually of the form: meaning that the constituent A is separated into the two sub-constituents B and C E.g. This means that [...]
A Table of Specifications is a two-way chart which describes the topics to be covered in a test and the number of items or points which will be associated with each topic. Sometimes the types of items are described as well. The purpose of a Table of Specifications is to identify the achievement domains being [...]
A phrase is a group of words acting as a single part of speech and not containing both a subject and a verb. It is a part of a sentence, and does not express a complete thought. Noun Phrases Noun phrases must have a Noun (or Pronoun) and may or may not have other modifiers [...]
A piece of language is said to be coherent (therefore discourse) if it has a discernible, unified meaning. A piece of discourse is said to be cohesive if its components (ie. sentences/phrases/words) are bound together through linguistic and non-linguistic features to form a unified whole. The linguistic features used to link one word/phrase/sentence to another [...]
Test bias is the presence of some characteristics of an item in the test, that results in differential performance by individuals of the same ability but different sub-group When important decisions are made based on test scores, it is critical to avoid bias which may unfairly influence test-takers’ scores Fairness and bias are not the [...]
Reliability refers to the consistency of a measure. A test is considered reliable if we get the same result repeatedly. E.g. If a test designed to measure a specific trait, then each time the test is administered to a subject, the results should be approximately the same. Unfortunately, it is impossible to calculate reliability exactly [...]
All languages have rules. These rules together form the grammarof that language. These rules are what enables a person to produce an infinite number of phrases/sentences from a finite number of possibilities, that is understood by both the speaker and the listener. It would be rather difficult to learn any language if each sentence had [...]
Lexical semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies how and what words of a language denote and thus involves the meaning of individual words. Lexical semantics focuses on theories of: classification and decomposition of word meaning differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning [...]
Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. Testing is a matter of making judgments about test-takers competence in view of their performance on certain tasks. These judgments are inferences as tests do not collect concrete evidence about test-takers’ ability, in the natural state, but only abstract inferences Evidence [...]
Word structure In morphology, word structure is described in terms of roots and affixes Simple words consist one morpheme – the root fun, go, danger Complex words consist more that one morpheme – the root + affix(es) funny, goes, endanger Languages have three principal ways of extending their vocabulary: invention of entirely new words borrowing [...]