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Articles |
Highly confident wrong answering—and how to detect it
George Yule is an associate professor in the Linguistics Program at Louisiana State University, where he teaches both theoretical and applied linguistics. With Gillian Brown, he wrote Discourse Analysis, Teaching the Spoken Language, and Teaching Talk, and more recently has published The Study of Language.
The use of a confidence-rating scale to accompany answers on a listening test provides a means of distinguishing between those learners who select answers based on effective self-monitoring and those whose answers are based on poor self-monitoring. In particular, the procedure is used to identify those learners who are choosing wrong answers with a fairly high degree of confidence that they are correct. It is also shown that individual language learners who select answers with this type of false confidence are more likely to do badly on subsequent tests, even after additional weeks of instruction. Test items with a confidence-rating scale and procedures for scoring are illustrated.