A Preliminary Study into the Development of an In-house Test for the Identification of Language Needs of EFL Students

Abstract

  In order to develop in-house test tasks that reflect the content of an institution’s curricula, a preliminary study was conducted by analyzing the linguistic variables of reading passages. The present study focuses on the differences between a commercially produced English proficiency test (TOEIC) that is adopted by the institution and the textbooks frequently used in the classroom regarding the syntactic structure of their reading passages.
  The study revealed that the syntactic structure of a commercially produced test and the textbooks are different regarding several aspects which confirms the suggestion that the use of an in-house test is preferable to the commercially produced test for the placement purposes.