A Comparative Study on the Different Performances between Grammar Question Tasks and Translating Question Task

Pursuing a more effective way to measure students’ grammar proficiency, this study compared students’ performances in grammar question tasks and translating question tasks administered as the summative assessment. To accomplish this comparison, 17 graduate school students participated in the study. At the end of the 16-week course of the General English, they took the final exam that covered the articles they had learned throughout the semester. The exam was composed of seven sections, but the data for this study obtained from the three sections only consisting of gap-filling task (6 items), error correction task (six items), and translating task (eight items). The analysis of the collected data was conducted employing the EXCEL program. One finding was that students performed much better in the grammar question tasks than in the translating task. Another finding was that students made errors in translating the sentences such as the omission of words, the omission of punctuation, and the omission of verb. These findings suggest that EFL teachers should include translating tasks as well as various grammar question tasks to measure students’ grammar proficiency.