How many times have students said to you “I’ll never understand the word get. It has so many meanings!” Just before I wrote this I looked up get in a concordancer (1), and these are a few examples of what I got (no pun intended…

Transparency is a test quality which refers to the extent to which it is clear to the learner what s/he has to do. This may be affected by factors such as : The clarity of the instructions, including whether they are written in l…

A rhetorical question is one which does not actually expect an answer but is used to allow the speaker/writer to make a point. They are common in persuasive texts , including such genres as political speeches and letters to new…

Synforms are lexical items similar in their phonological, graphic and/or morphological features. Laufer (1988) showed that they could create problems not only for learners of English (including advanced learners) but also for n…

Instruction Check Questions are questions asked to the learners after a teacher has set up a task to ensure that they have fully understood what they have to do. For example, in a lesson where the learners have been studying way…

The infinitive is a non-finite verb  (ie not marked for person, tense or number) which may be used : a) alone - the "bare" infinitive : I might go . b) preceded by the infinitive particle to :  I want  to go  now.…

Coverage is a quality of a test, and refers to the number and appropriacy of the items included. This should be balanced and reflect what the learner has been taught and/or is expected to know. A test might have inadequate covera…

Hyperbole :An exaggerated expression, which is not literally true, but is used to emphasise the degree of something.  Examples: I've asked you  a million times  not to do that! She's got  tons of  money. I'm starving …

Lexical chunk is an umbrella term for "words that go together" and covers various types of lexical relationships such as: collocations (eg heavy rain, wild idea, narrow minded, depend on) idioms ( eg not in a month of…

PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) is an approach to teaching structure, function, phonology  and lexis that has been used since the late 1970s. It is useful for teaching language items which are completely new to the learne…

F resh starts are a feature of a test that  can make the  results more reliable. A test with fresh starts will be divided into a number of sections, each testing a different area of language or skills/subskills, so that no one a…

This sentence is incorrectly punctuated, it is an example of a comma splice . In English, two main clauses cannot be separated in writing by a comma only - as in the example above. There must be a conjunction added, or a lterna…

A reflexive pronoun is one that refers back to another noun, usually the subject of the verb:  myself, yourself, himself, herself, oneself, itself, ourselves, yourselves,  and  themselves .  They are therefore unusual in that a …