Test question development

In order to gauge the performance of learners, it is a common practice to conduct tests (Shohamy, Donitsa-Schmidt, & Ferman, 1996). 28 questions were asked in the pre- and post-tests to identify the role of teachers’ code switching in the students’ learning of grammar. The questions for the test utilised the regular test methods and used exactly the same questions in the pre- and post-tests, however in a changed

order to see whether the students’ knowledge of grammar had improved. Such grammar tests have been used by other researchers when investigating code switching to test improvement (Sankoff & Poplack, 1981; Wheeler & Swords, 2010). This section describes the format and procedure of the pre- and post-test questions.

Question format

Recognition and production are generally the aspects most commonly focused on when testing grammar (Ervin, 1964). To test recognition ability, various methods such as multiple choice questions (Liu & Reed, 1995), error recognition, true or false detection, pair matching and cloze methods (John Jr, 1972) are used. On the other hand, common methods are used to test the student’s ability to reproduce English grammar, item completion, transformation, paraphrasing, rearranging, blank filling, editing sentences and word substitution. Since the objective of this study is to understand any improvement in students’ grammar, including recognition as well as production, a combination of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions was used.

Topics covered Question

Conjunction Fill in the blank with the suitable conjunction Types of sentences

(simple, compound, complex)

Specify the type of each sentence

Choose the correct indirect statement that reports the following sentences

Clauses Underline the dependent clause in the following sentences and circle its type

Choose the type of the following dependent clauses Combination of all topics Circle the best completion for the following

Table 5: Types of test questions and the topics covered in pre- and post-test questions

Exam procedures

The pre-test took place in week one of the semester before class started, and the post-test was conducted in week 16 after the class finished. In both tests, the students were given half an hour to answer 28 questions. As the questions did not require

them to write in narrative form, they were given only half an hour to complete the test.

Questions

The following are the questions asked in the pre- and post-tests, which examined the topics outlined in Table 5. The idea was that the students undertaking the pre-test would not be able to correctly identify what the clauses in the test were. However, in the post-test, the possibility that students would be able to do so was much higher, since they had studied this in class by then. However, not all the students were expected to answer everything correctly and the test would determine, on average, which class’s students did better.

1) Underline the dependent clause in the following sentences and circle its type.

In this question, the students were given four sentences, were asked to underline the dependent clause in each sentence and then circle whether that clause was an adverbial clause, a noun clause, or an adjectival clause.

2) Specifying the type of sentence.

In this question, students were asked to state whether the sentence was a simple, compound, complex or compound complex sentence. Identification of such types of sentences is generally much easier than identification of other types of grammar, due to their obvious syntactic variation (Snyder, 2001). Therefore, the expectation was that students might be able to identify these correctly even in the pre-test, and this question may thus provide an indication of the level of students’ existing grammar knowledge.

3) Choose the type of the following dependent clauses.

In this question, correct identification of the clause becomes more complex. Here, students were asked to identify the subjunctive clause, the time clause, and the restrictive clause. An understanding of dependent clauses allows students to create complete sentences rather than sentences that are left “hanging” (Folse, Mitchell, Smith-Palinkas, Tortorella, & Arbor, 2005). These were covered in detail in class

and therefore students were expected to know the answers in the post-test more often than in the pre-test.

4) Circle the best completion for the following.

There were six fill-in-the-blank questions in this section and each question had a different type of answer. Someone who has a good command of English may be able to answer this well, even if they have not studied advanced grammar. However, similar to the previous question, students were expected to do better in the post-test.

5) Choose the correct indirect statements that clarify the following sentences.

Students were given two sentences that used indirect statements, but only one of them was correct. Therefore, the task was to identify which statement was incorrect. This question was designed to test their understanding of the usage of indirect statements.

6) Fill in the blank with the suitable conjunction.

In this question, students were to choose a conjunction that would fit the sentence containing a blank line. Similar to the sentence completion task, it was possible for students with a good command of English to answer correctly in the pre- test.