Investigating English Teachers and Content Instructors’ Tests in the ESP Exams at Medical Universities

This study aimed to investigate the test types which English teachers and content instructors employ in the ESP exams. To do so, samples of the tests developed by the ESP teachers were collected. Moreover, semi-structured interviews were performed with both groups to gain insights into their attitudes towards testing. The results indicated that word-formation, translation, definition, multiple-choice, reading comprehension, and cloze test were the test types the teachers used. It was revealed that except for cloze tests, which were used only by the English teachers, other test types were used by both groups; the frequency of the test types, however, differed in the exams. It was also discovered that both groups of the teachers used multiple-choice tests most frequently. The results of the interviews showed that the English teachers preferred integrative and communicative tests, whereas the content instructors tended to use syllabus-based structuralist tests. The study concludes that the ESP teachers mostly favored pre-scientific and psychometric-structuralist approaches to testing and did not use communicative tests. The implications of the study pertain to the pivotal role of the ESP teachers’ awareness and evaluation of the students’ real needs for English as well as the teachers’ testing literacy in ESP courses.