국가영어능력평가시험 (NEAT) 쓰기평가 문항분석

Writing item analysis of the National English Ability Test

In late 2012, it will be decided if National English Ability Test (NEAT) will be replaced by the English test of college entrance examination in Korea from the 2016 academic year on. To investigate if the aims of the NEAT lead to the improvement of students’ communicative competence, the present study analyzes high school students’ responses on NEAT writing tests, tracking 65 communicative functions and 36 language forms devised from the revised 7th and 9th national English curriculum of Korea. The results reveal that NEAT writing items currently do not meet the test’s goals. Regarding communicative functions, test-takers used a couple of communicative functions intensively, and a number of other functions were used under one percent of the time. As for language forms for communication, test-takers used 31 language forms out of 36; however, a lot of language forms were used under 10 times. Based on the results, four suggestions were proposed for developing NEAT writing items: (a) developing a student needs analysis to find appropriate writing genres; (b) diversifying writing genres to avoid development of test taking strategies; (c) devising writing items that exactly test skills presented by the national English curriculum; (d) piloting items.