Article published in:
Approaches to learning, testing, and researching L2 vocabulary
Edited by Stuart Webb
[ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 169:1] 2018
► pp. 115–141

The guessing from context test

| Kyoto University, Japan
| The University of Western Ontario, Canada
This study aims to develop two equivalent forms of the Guessing from Context Test (GCT) and provide its preliminary validity evidence. The GCT is a diagnostic test of the guessing skill and measures the following three important steps in guessing: identifying the part of speech of an unknown word, finding its discourse clue, and deriving its meaning. The test was administered to 428 Japanese learners of English. The results indicate that the two forms each with 20 question sets are equivalent in terms of item difficulty distribution and representativeness of the construct being measured. A wide range of validity evidence was provided using Messick’s validation framework, the Rasch model, qualitative investigations into the relationships to actual guessing, and proposals for score interpretation.
Keywords: vocabulary, guessing from context, diagnostic test, equivalent forms, validation.
Published online: 16 April 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.00009.sas
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