The Application of Corpus Linguistics to Language Testing

This book examines how corpora and corpus linguistics techniques can be used to identify and improve problematic questions in multiple choice English language tests aimed at Japanese students. Three types of problematic test questions were identified in a corpus of such test questions 1) those which had distractors which were not congruent with learners’ actual errors 2) those with repeatedly used stems that were not frequent in English 3) those which had more than one possible correct answer. I identified ten representative questions of each type and attempted to improve them by using different corpora and corpus linguistic techniques. I then gave 343 Japanese students both sets of questions: the original questions (Test X) and the same questions altered by corpus techniques (Test Y). The tests were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively (via the use of the think aloud protocol).