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Ideological Orientations in TOEFL iBT: A Critical Language Testing Perspective Masked Agendas!

Reza Alizadeh, Mohsen | 2018

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 50929 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Salehi, Mohammad
  7. Abstract:
  8. It is generally believed that the only utility of tests as a critical instrument is to be at the service of educational institutions. To broadly consider their different usefulness, tests can serve other purposes like focusing on the ethical and moral issues. As it is called Critical Language Testing, tests are not reliable instruments and they have the capacity of being used not only in educational, but also in political contexts. This philosophy has not been brought into perspective, and, as a result, the literature deserves more comprehensive attention. This study, guided by the principles of Grounded Theory and Qualitative research design, pursued three purposes: To investigate the nature and purpose of TPOs (TOEFL Practice Online tests which considered as TOEFL’s previous original questions), to explore the extent to which those questions and items are fair across different test takers, and to extract students’ ideas about the misuses. To address this issue and with relying on CLT perspectives and content analysis, a test battery was utilized to meticulously analyze a multitude of passages and items for misused instances. Further, the goal was to discover fairness issues by the framework presented by Willingham and Cole (1997). In particular, the findings revealed that the purpose of the exam was to genuinely assess students’ knowledge, as it is not in relation or dependent on any group or specific agency. Moreover, the results indicated that some items and questions favored American or European figures and topics as it had not been fairly distributed worldwide but the purpose was not to dignify a figure or place by degrading the others. In terms of fairness, no source of bias, offensive content or stereotypes toward any group has been detected. Finally, the results of the present study stress the necessity of attention to ethical and fairness issues, the power of tests, their nature, and some suggestions for further research studies
  9. Keywords:
  10. Critical Language Testing ; Ideological Orientations ; TOEFL Practice Online (TPO) ; TOEFL IBT ; Masked Agendas

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