An Investigation of the Impact of Delivery Mode on the Integrated Skills in English (ISE) exam (phase 1)

This funded project aims to examine the impact of mode of delivery (face-to-face and paper-and-pencil versus online) on the Integrated Skills of English (ISE) exam suite. More specifically, the study will concentrate on four areas: (1) A comparison of scores across delivery modes; (2) An investigation of test-takers’ perceptions of each delivery mode; (3) An analysis of written discourse produced on a sub-set of writing tasks across each delivery mode; (4) An analysis of spoken discourse produced on a sub-set of speaking tasks across each delivery mode. The study is part of a larger validation study of the effect of mode of delivery on the ISE exams, aiming to provide provisional evidence to support or query claims of context validity if a switch to online delivery were to be implemented.