Testing present and past tense competence within NMT exam in the English language: strategy, CCQ instruction and practice

Abstract

Nowadays, according to the Ukrainian system of education, to enter the university, the school-leavers have to pass the National Multi-subject Test (NMT), and the English language is one of the optional subjects necessary to gain admission to the profession of their choice. A great deal of recent studies have concentrated on the recommendations and possible strategies to accomplish tasks that check the level of lexis, reading, listening and writing skills, whereas less attention has been paid to the grammatical part. Owing to the complicated military situation in Ukraine, the format of the former External Independent Evaluation (EIE) exam in the English language was transformed to NMT; however, some components remained unchangeable, in particular, the Use of English part, where grammatical competence is assessed. The present Master’s thesis proposed a method to complete the multiple-choice task of the Use of English part of the NMT that monitors the candidate’s grammatical knowledge of verbal tenses. This study examined the frequency of questions that test the present and past tenses in active voice per examination paper from 2014 until 2023 and experimentally investigated the effectiveness of the proposed method that includes a strategy to complete a grammatical task, the concept checking questions (CCQs) as an explanatory tool to analyse the context of the multiple-choice questions and options, and the practical exercises with a time limit. Nineteen learners who studied English at the intermediate level in a vocational education and training institution participated in a three-week experiment. The results of the quantitative research showed that the outlined method had a significantly positive impact on the EFL learners’ grammatical performance. The findings suggest that before sitting NMT in the English language, the candidates should be aware of the structure of the examination paper and of each task. Importantly, when completing the Use of English part, they should consider the context and key words (the subject and the temporal markers in case of the verbal tenses) as well as analyse the multiple-choice variants to choose the correct answer. Finally, practising authentic questions from the previous years’ exam papers and from similar to NMT tasks with a time limit enhances exam preparation which may contribute to the success of learners’ test performance.