The Development of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL)
This chapter describes the development of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL), which is a proficiency assessment tool for Chinese learners. It is divided into four major sections. First, a brief background of Teaching Chinese as a Second Lan
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The Development of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL) Li-ping Chang
Abstract This chapter describes the development of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL), which is a proficiency assessment tool for Chinese learners. It is divided into four major sections. First, a brief background of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Taiwan is provided together with the historical development of the Chinese Proficiency Test (CPT) and the Test of Proficiency-Huayu (TOP), which were the predecessors of the TOCFL. The second section discusses issues that the TOCFL research team faced in its effort to map the test to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The third section then discusses four challenging issues that the TOCFL research team has faced over the years in its effort to develop and maintain a standardized CSL/CFL test. The final section presents some washback effects of the TOCFL and work in progress. Keywords Proficiency test testing TOCFL CEFR
Chinese as a second/foreign language CSL/CFL
Introduction Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) began in the 1950s in Taiwan as a branch of the Yale University system of teaching Mandarin Chinese. At that time, most Mandarin Chinese centers used textbooks from the Yale University series, for example, Tewksbury’s Speak Chinese (1948), and offered small-group classes of two to three people for two hours per day, five days per week. In response to the global increase in the study of Chinese language, in 1995, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) founded the first graduate institute to offer an MA program in the field of TCSL. As TCSL slowly but steadily became an important academic discipline, a test designed for Chinese as a Second Language was necessary. In 2001, some professionals and scholars from the Mandarin Training Center (MTC), L. Chang (&) National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 D. Zhang and C.-H. Lin (eds.), Chinese as a Second Language Assessment, Chinese Language Learning Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4089-4_2
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the NTNU Graduate Institute of TCSL, and the NTNU Research Center for Psychological and Educational Testing (RCPET) formed a research team that started to construct a Chinese Proficiency Test referred to as the CPT (華語文能力 測驗), which later became what is now the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL). This chapter focuses primarily on the early development of the TOCFL from 2001 to 2011, the 10-year period that witnessed the test’s advancement from the embryonic stage to the forming stage. It is divided into four sections. First, a brief overview is provided on the historical development of the Chinese Proficiency Test (CPT) and the Test of Proficiency-Huayu (TOP), which were the predecessors of the TOCFL. The second section discusses issues that the TOCFL research team faced in its effort to map the test to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR
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