Online Language Proficiency Assessment

The mastery of English is seen to be instrumental for developing nations such as Malaysia to gain competitive edge in the global market. Seeking to be a competitive knowledge-based economy with a world-class workforce, Malaysia reintroduced the English language as a medium of instruction for science, mathematics, and technology related subjects back into the education system in 2001.

It is necessary to be reminded at this juncture that the role of English language here, at best, is to complement and supplement but never to substitute for or compete with the socio cultural role that have been well imbedded and well entrenched in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia. Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad said that the globalization wave has brought on the need for us to redefine the concept of nationalism from a pragmatic perspective.

This re-emphasized on mastering the English language is a significant policy change that has affected educators, especially those whose professional experiences have largely involved the use of Bahasa Malaysia in the medium of instruction.

The Need For In-Service English Language Training For UKM Lecturers
UKM has grown from strength to strength in achieving its vision and mission in using, developing and promoting the national language as an academic language for knowledge building. This was managed through translation of knowledge from English into Bahasa Malaysia by academicians.

However in this new millennium and with the onset of globalization, UKM in its efforts to remain competitive in a borderless world has now given emphasized to the use of English for academic and professional purposes. The cognitive processes and academics literacy skills that these educators need to engaged in and employ to translate their knowledge gained and understood in Bahasa Malaysia into the English language is still unclear. What is clear from the outset though, is the need to approximate their current English language proficiency and academic English literacy competency levels.

For this purpose, the English language competency test should profile the lecturers’ general English language proficiency and instructional language control in the target language.

Online Test Construction.
As university lecturers are busy, an online test that can be accessed anywhere in the campus, with less anxiety and with apprehension level minimized should be the most suitable approach. The School of Language Studies and Linguistic views language learning as a continuous development for all motivated learners. In the spirit of this principle, the school is committed to develop new approaches to help support and harness that learning.

UKM IT Agenda In Brief
UKM approach towards ICT implementation can be considered quite conservative. Only in 1994, UKM produced its ICT blueprint to equip its staff for K-economy and globalization (Aziz Deraman & Syahrul Fahmi, 2003). The concept of K-campus as proposed by Aziz Deraman and Syahrul Fahmi (2003), which is to establish a knowledge-centric e-campus whereby a web based system is used to facilitate education knowledge and resource services for the campus community. The knowledge services are further classified into 2 main categories, namely, education ICT services that deal with the instruction and content offered in non-linear formats for various users and management ICT services that deal with staff and students’ database – resumes, work record, students’ registration, final exam grades and others.

Learning Care Platform
LearningCare is a web based fully integrated e-learning solution, which provides UKM community aa tool to develop, implement and share effectively the used of web-based technology for intra- and inter- organization learning process. This system includes portfolio (courses) management system, LeraningCare Resources and LearningCare Portal System.

Online Test Development

Online test construction
The team constructed the placement test using the LearningCare web-based system. LearningCare does provide a relatively simple interface for test development, scoring and statistic keeping.

Format And Timing
Cloze-type test – a series of three 10-item cloze type passages presented in increasing order of difficulty, with blanks selected to represent grammar and vocabulary items, as well as to some extent testing overall comprehension. Conversational cloze is designed to rate the oral ability or test takers because a direct measure of oral ability is not feasible.