LISTENING SKILL ASSESSMENT

    There are some foundation principles of language assessment were introduced. Concepts like practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, washback, direct and indirect testing, and performative and summative assessment are by now part of your vocabulary. The day to day classroom assessment of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Since the level at which you will most frequently have the opportunity to apply principles of assessment.
    For something in the way of a focus on form in assessment. There is no such thing as a test of grammar of vocabulary that does not invoke  one or more of the separate skills of listening, speaking, reading, or writing. It is not uncommon to find little “grammar test” and “vocabulary test” in textbook, and these may be perfectly useful instrument. But responses on these quizzer are usually written, with multiple choice selectio nor fill in the blank items.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING
    One reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. In addition, the evertly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measureable  then listening. But perhaps a deerper cause lies in universal biases toward speaking. A good speaker is often (unwisely) valued more highly than a good listener.
BASIC TYPES OF LISTENING
Those are four commonly identified types of listening performance,each  of which comprises a category within which to consider assessment tasks and procedures.
1.    Intensive. Listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.) of a larger stretch of language.
2.    Responsive. Listening to a relatively short stretch of language (a greeting, question, command, comprehension check, etc.) in order to make an equally short response.
3.    Selective. Processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to “scan” for certain information.
4.    Extensive. Listening to develope a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.

An Introduction to Pragmatics In Linguistics

Pragmatics is the study of how language is used in communication. The pragmatic of language is concerned with audience-directed intention-how the speaker or writer intends the utterance to be taken. It deals very explicitly with the study of relationship holding between linguistic forms and the human beings who use these forms. As such, pragmatics is concerned with people’s intentions, assumptions, beliefs, goals, and the kinds of actions they perform while using language.

Pragmatics is also concerned with context, situation, and settings within which such language uses occur. According to Yule17, the area of pragmatics deals with the speaker meaning and contextual meaning. Speaker meaning is concerned with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances rather than what the words and phrases in those utterances might mean in and of themselves. Speaker meaning, rather than sentence meaning, can only begin to be understood when context is taken into consideration. Any utterance, therefore, can take on various meanings depending on who produced it and under what circumstances.

This science studies the context within which the interaction occurs as well as the intention of the language users. Who are the addressees, what is the relation between speakers/writers and hearers/readers, when and where does the speech event occur and so on. Pragmatics also explore how listeners and readers can make inferences about what is said or written in order to arrive at an interpretation of the user’s intended meaning. There are four kinds of context. First, physical context, it is where a conversation and what action takes places, and what objects are present. Second, epistemic context, it is a background knowledge shared by speaker and hearer. The third is linguistic context. It is about the utterance which is followed by other utterances under consideration. Fourth or the last is social context. It is the social relationship and setting of interactive participants. Obviously, the emphasis in this kind of exploration must be placed not only on what is actually said but also on what is not being said explicitly but recognized implicitly as part of the communicative exchange, such as presupposition,  implication, shared knowledge and circumstantial evidence.

History of English Law in England and Wales

    English law is the legal system of England and Wales, and is the basis of common law, legal systems used in most Commonwealth countries and the United States except Louisiana (as opposed to civil law or pluralist systems in use in other countries). It was exported to Commonwealth countries while the British Empire was established and maintained, and it forms the basis of the jurisprudence of most of those countries. English law prior to the American Revolution is still part of the law of the United States through reception statutes, except in Louisiana, and provides the basis for many American legal traditions and policies, though it has no superseding jurisdiction.
    English law in its strictest sense applies within the jurisdiction of England and Wales. Whilst Wales now has a devolved Assembly, any legislation which that Assembly enacts is enacted in particular circumscribed policy areas defined by the Government of Wales Act 2006, other legislation of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, or by orders in council given under the authority of the 2006 Act. Furthermore that legislation is, as with any by-law made by any other body within England and Wales, interpreted by the undivided judiciary of England and Wales.
    The essence of English common law is that it is made by judges sitting in courts, applying their common sense and knowledge of legal precedent (stare decisis) to the facts before them. A decision of the highest appeal court in England and Wales, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, is binding on every other court in the hierarchy, and they will follow its directions. For example, there is no statute making murder illegal.[citation needed] It is a common law crime - so although there is no written Act of Parliament making murder illegal, it is illegal by virtue of the constitutional authority of the courts and their previous decisions. Common law can be amended or repealed by Parliament; murder, by way of example, carries a mandatory life sentence today, but had previously allowed the death penalty.
    England and Wales are constituent countries of the United Kingdom, which is a member of the European Union. Hence, EU law is a part of English law. The European Union consists mainly of countries which use civil law and so the civil law system is also in England in this form. The European Court of Justice can direct English and Welsh courts on the meaning of areas of law in which the EU has passed legislation.
    The oldest written law currently in force is the Distress Act, part of the Statute of Marlborough, 1267 (52 Hen. 3).[5] Three sections of Magna Charta, originally signed in 1215 and a landmark in the development of English law, are extant but arguably they date to the consolidation of the act in 1297.

History of English Law

    The Commentaries were long regarded as the leading work on the development of English law and played a role in the development of the American legal system. They were in fact the first methodical treatise on the common law suitable for a lay readership since at least the middle Ages. The common law of England has relied on precedent more than statute and codifications and has been far less amenable than the civil law, developed from the Roman law, to the needs of a treatise. The Commentaries were influential largely because they were in fact readable, and because they met a need. The work is as much an apologia for the legal system of the time as it is an explanation, even when the law was obscure, Blackstone sought to make it seem rational, just, and inevitable that things should be how they were.
    The Commentaries are often quoted as the definitive pre-Revolutionary source of common law by United States courts. Opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States quotes from Blackstone's work whenever they wish to engage in historical discussion that goes back that far, or farther (for example, when discussing the intent of the Framers of the Constitution). The book was famously used as the key in Benedict Arnold's book cipher, which he used to communicate secretly with his conspirator John André during their plot to betray the Continental Army during the American Revolution.   
    The Commentaries on the Laws of England are an influential 18th-century treatise on the common law of England by Sir William Blackstone, originally published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, 1765-1769. The work is divided into four volumes, on the rights of persons, the rights of things, of private wrongs and of public wrongs.

Hegemony and Marxism

            Hegemony is unavoidable for Marxism; it is either a strong reinforcement of Marx’s theories or a contradiction of them. In an important document, the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:
            The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
            This is the classic statement of historical materialism. Does not Gramsci’s notion of hegemony run flatly counter to Marx’s words? Gramsci himself, however, thought that his own ideas improved upon Marx rather than discredited him. He said that the materialism expressed in the words just quoted were not truly Marxist but ‘must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx.’ This dispute has never been definitively settled; Marxists in the USSR tended to follow the harsher view - that life is determined by material factors; Western Marxists have, on the whole, favored Gramsci’s view that ideas are at least equally important.
            Gramsci, has some very interesting theories about the role of intellectuals, both in revolutionary movements and in society in general. It is, also, fascinating to look at the many examples in History of groups or classes in societies who owe their power in whole or in part to their intellectual and moral superiority. One may think of the Catholic Church down the ages, and of priesthoods in general. There is the hegemony, up to recent times, in the USA of WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. There was the British culture in India under the Raj, and the ‘nomenklatura’ of the USSR.  Nomenklatura means a small elite group within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region.
            Here are the basic differences between Gramsci’s hegemony and Marx’s marxism: Gramsci supports capitalism, while Marxism is basic theory of modern communism.  Also, Gramsci creates cultural hegemony theory as way to keep the sustainability of capitalism; while Marx thinks that capitalism makes the workers live miserably.

References
Englestad, F. (Ed.). (2003). Introductory chapter. In Power,culture,hegemony. Introduction to comparative social research (Vol. 21) . Oxford: Elsevier science. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from Institute for social research Web site

TES OBJEKTIF BENTUK PILIHAN GANDA (Multiple Choice Item Test)

Pengertian
    Beberapa definisi tentang Tes Objektif Bentuk Pilihan Ganda (Multiple Choice Test) antara lain, merupakan tes objektif dimana masing-masing item disediakan lebih dari dua kemungkinan jawaban, dan hanya satu dari pilihan-pilihan tersebut yang benar. (Noeng Muhajir, 1981:81)
     Multiple Choice Test merupakan salah satu bentuk tes objektif yang terdiri atas pertanyaan atau pernyataan yang sifatnya belum selesai, dan untuk menyelesaikannya harus dipilih salah satu atau lebih dari beberapa kemungkinan jawab yang telah disediakan pada tiap-tiap butir soal yang bersangkutan.
    Multiple Choice Test terdiri atas suatu keterangan atau penberitahuan tentang suatu pengertian yang belum lengkap, dan untuk melengkapinya harus memilih satu dari beberapa kemungkinan jawaban yang telah disediakan.
    Tes jenis ini pada pokoknya menghadapkan kepada siswa sejumlah alternatif jawaban, umumnya antara 3 sampai 5 alternatif untuk setiap soal dan tugas siswa adalah memilih salah satu di antara alternative tersebut berdasarkan sesuatu dasar pertimbangan tertentu (kadang-kadang sebagai variasi, tidak ditentukan harus memilih satu, tetapi dimana perlu harus memilih lebih dari satu yang dipilih, tentu saja variasi ini lebih sukar daripada variasi pilihan tunggal).
    Pada jenis tes pilihan ganda ini bentuk soal terdiri dari beberapa bagian pokok antara lain:
a.    Stem ini biasa berbentuk pertanyaan, perintah maupun kalimat tidak sempurna.
b.     Options adalah alternative-alternatif jawaban yang menyertainya atau jika diterjemahkan secara langsung berarti pilihan-pilihan. Options terbagi menjadi dua:
1)    Key atau kunci, adalah alternative jawaban yang benar.
2)    Distractors atau pengganggu/pengecoh, adalah alternative-alternatif lainnya yang bertujuan mempersulit proses pencapaian jawaban yang benar.

 

 

 

Sudiyono, Anas. Pengantar Evaluasi Pendidikan. Jakarta: Raja Grafindo Persada. 1996.
Thoha, M. Chabib. Teknik Evaluasi Pendidikan. Jakarta: CV Rajawali. 1991.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE HISTORY

English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to Britain in the 5th Century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany. The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries.

English Language
English is a West Germanic language which is the dominant language in the United Kingdom, the United States, many Commonwealth nations including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other former British colonies. It is the second most spoken language in the world. It is estimated that there are 380 million native speakers and 300 million who use English as a second language and a further 100 million use it as a foreign language. It is the language of science, aviation, computing, diplomacy, and tourism. It is listed as the official or co-official language of over 45 countries and is spoken extensively in other countries where it has no official status. English plays a part in the cultural, political or economic life of the following countries.

History of the English Language
    English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to Britain in the 5th Century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany. The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Norman (an oil language closely related to French).

             The history of the language can be traced back to the arrival of three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th Century AD. Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is the present day Denmark and northern Germany. The inhabitants of Britain previously spoke a Celtic language. This was quickly displaced. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Their language was called Englisc from which the word, English derives.

          It is convenient to divide English into periods—Old English (or Anglo-Saxon; to c.1150), Middle English (to c.1500), and Modern English.