چکیده:
Of the many dilemmas facing the assessment of literary competence, one is the extent to which language should constitute part of the target construct intended to be measured. Some argue for the construct-irrelevance of language and hence recommend that it be eliminated or minimized in favor of an exclusive focus on literary competence. In practice, this does not seem to be the case, as language proficiency considerations seem to creep into assessment, clouding assessment outcomes. The current study sought to examine students' perceptions of the degree to which knowledge of language constitutes part of the construct of literary competence in two departments of English and Persian literature. To this end, a total of seventy students in two poetry courses, one in the English department and the other in the Persian, responded to a questionnaire designed to gauge their perceptions of the extent to which language competence constitutes a component of the literary competence. Data were analyzed through one sample and independent samples t-tests. It was found that language competence is somehow construct-irrelevant in testing literary competence. Interestingly, measurement-invariance was observed regarding Persian and EFL students’ stance on the construct-irrelevance of language in tests of literary achievement and competence.
خلاصه ماشینی:
English and Persian Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of the Construct-(ir)Relevance of Language Proficiency in the Assessment of Literary Competence Kioumars Razavipour Assistant Professor Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz razavipur57@gmail.
The current study sought to examine students’ perceptions of the degree to which knowledge of language constitutes part of the construct of literary competence in two departments of English and Persian literature.
To this end, a total of seventy students in two poetry courses, one in the English department and the other in the Persian, responded to a questionnaire designed to gauge their perceptions of the extent to which language competence constitutes a component of the literary competence.
Since all items in the current instrument were written in the pursuit of measuring participants’ perception of the construct relevance of language proficiency, the data for the present study were of the latter type, Likert scale, and hence amenable to parametric statistics.
4. Results In this section, after checking the normality assumption of the data, we first present the descriptive statistics regarding participants’ perceptions of the construct-relevance of language proficiency in the assessment of their achievement of literary competence.
23, df=72), indicating similarity between Persian and English literature students in regard of their stances concerning the construct-(ir)relevance of language proficiency in assessing literary achievement.
Interestingly, Persian literature students and students of English literature held similar views concerning the construct relevance of language to testing literary competence (see Table 4).
In other words, independent samples t-test results indicated that English and Persian students held similar views concerning the construct (ir)relevance of language proficiency to literary competence.