Content validity of a Spanish oral placement Test

Abstract

The present study explores on speaking language testing. Precisely it focuses on the inclusion of content validity as further evidence of the validity of an exam. The complexity of measuring content validity remains, in the first place, in defining the test domain and in selecting linguistic tasks and samples that adequately represent this domain. Secondly, this difficulty is due to the lack of information on how to develop procedures for estimating this type of validity evidence (Newman, Lim & Pineda 2013). This work reviews the concept of content validity and details the procedure for validating the content of a speaking placement test in Spanish as a Foreing Language through expert judgment applying the focus group technique. Results confirm the relevance of the proposed methodology to achieve unanimous expert judgments and to validate the representativeness and relevance of test content.