Nowadays, mastering a foreign language, especially English, plays an important role in our social life. It is obvious that mastering English helps the country not only have more contacts with more nations in the world but also enrich its people’s knowledge.
There are more and more people in Vietnam who want to learn English with different purposes. Therefore, English has been introduced as a compulsory subject in almost every school and college in Vietnam. Like any other subjects, it needs some kinds of evaluation to measure students’ performance and ability, in which accuracy, objectivity and logicality are required. Nevertheless, almost all teachers lack experience, and are often not formally trained in test designing.
Academy of Finance is a university in which there are a number of non-major English students. In other words, the students lack background knowledge of English. They only have chances to learn 150 periods of English for Business Basics (EBB) during their first two terms to prepare for their 120 periods of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the fourth and the fifth term. In fact, many students admit that English is quite demanding for them, they could not learn it well, even General English. In spite of the fact that they were very hard working, many students failed or got bad results after each final examination. One of the most important causes for the above situation is the matter of testing. Quite often, the present tests show a gap between the things students learn in the course and the tasks they have to do in the tests, i.e. the tests contain items that are unfamiliar or too difficult to students.