중학교 영어듣기평가 문항 분석

Item analysis of an intramural English listening test of middle school

The purpose of this study is to analyze the question items and common errors, to find out useful strategies through listening tests, and finally to help improve the English communicative competence of learners. One hundred and fifty second grade students in a middle school located in Siheung participated in this study. Classical Test Theory(item difficulty, item discrimination, distractor’s attractiveness) was used in order to analyze the listening test done by the students. This research focused on the difficulty students had processing comprehension questions. Students were also divided into low and high levels in order to assess their abilities to process questions. The research findings can be summarized as follows: First, the listening test consists of 40% of bottom-up processing, 55% of top-down processing, and 5% of interactive processing. It indicates that it is necessary to assign more items to interactive processing. Second, the score of average item difficulty is 0.725 and item discrimination is 0.508. Thus, it seemed that the listening test had proper difficulty and discrimination. Some distractors are not attractive and it means that it is necessary to develop elaborative distractors. Third, the participants had difficulty in bottom-up processing most among the three processes. To help compensate for this, learners will need to know what they will hear before listening. Fourth, the processing difficulties were different when students were divided into low and high levels. The high level students had difficulty in bottom-up processing. On the other hand, the low level students had a problem in top-down processing. These findings suggest that the students do not know the strategies which are necessary for them to succeed in listening tests. Therefore, to improve students listening skills, appropriate strategies are required. In addition, students should be exposed to a wide variety of listening materials.