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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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Features of the GCT
    • 2.1What clues are included?
    • 2.2How is the guessing skill measured?
  • 3.Development of two equivalent forms
    • 3.1Materials preparation
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Materials
    • 3.4Item analysis
    • 3.5Creating equivalent forms
  • 4.Test evaluation
    • 4.1Content aspect of construct validity
    • 4.2Substantive aspect of construct validity
    • 4.3Structural aspect of construct validity
    • 4.4Generalizability aspect of construct validity
    • 4.5External aspect of construct validity
    • 4.6Qualitative investigation
    • 4.7Score interpretation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.00009.sas
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