Abstract:
The present study was an attempt to investigate the validity of the English section of Iranian Universities PhD Entrance Exam in TEFL. To this end, 15 EFL learners from university of Isfahan who were in their last semester of that MA education were invited to contribute to the study. A group of 5 university lecturers were also asked to support the study as expert judges. A TOEFL reading paper was used to divide the participants into three ability groups, each consisting of five learners. Think-aloud study was used to find out the strategies each ability group used when completing the test. All the participants completed the reading section of the PhD Entrance Exam while verbalizing their thoughts. The verbal reports were transcribed and coded based on Barati’s (2005) taxonomy of Test-taking strategies. The Chi- square analysis of the think aloud protocols revealed that Monitoring and Evaluation strategies were used significantly more than other strategies by all ability groups. Moreover, the results indicated that the high ability group of test takers were more successful compared with others in maneuvering among different type of strategies. Further, different patterns of strategy use were observed in the three ability groups. The findings of the present study may be of interest to the PhD Entrance Exam developers as well as EFL material designers and classroom instructors.
Machine summary:
In a more recent study, Kashkouli, Barati, and Nejad Ansari (2015) examined the test- taking strategies employed to answer the Iranian National University Entrance Exam for MA in TEFL.
E5=Evaluate understanding after reading the text, items and/ or alternatives 2: P3=Plan next section 3: M14= Paraphrase the text or items for better comprehension 4: M2= Return to the text passage a second or more times to look for or confirm an answer 5: E6= Evaluate the selected choice by giving reasons Frequency of strategies used The significance of differences among the three ability groups of this study was explored by running Chi-square analysis on the data.
In other words, high ability group used M1 (Use general knowledge in order cope with written material), M4 (Find the portion of the text that question refers to and then look for clues to the answer), M8 (Restate the text, item, and/or alternative language for better comprehension), M14 (Paraphrase the text or items for better comprehension) and M18 (Misunderstanding or lack of certainty) significantly more than other two groups and M12 (Highlight unknown or important words in the text or/and items for better comprehension) was used significantly by intermediate group.
Table 5, below, presents the frequency of strategies of Evaluation type employed by test-takers: Table 5: Frequency of Evaluation Strategies used by three ability groups / High Intermediate Low Chi-squared {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} As indicated above, the three ability groups of this study used E2 (Make a choice and be ready to change it should there be any clue in the subsequent items), E5 (Try to answer to the question before looking at the options provided), and E6 (Make an educated guess – i.