In order to test the efficacy of a piece of teaching/learning, the standard practice in Applied Linguistics is to give a pre-test and post-test of the same kind and level of difficulty, trying to isolate the effectiveness of the teaching by keeping everything else the same.

In the Wigan Language Project we hypothesized that the course would show an improvement in the reading and writing of academic/formal English. So we set pre- and post-tests at the beginning and end of Book 2 (Year 8) and Book 3 (Year 9).

Book 2 taught the language of abstract ideas and Book 3 basic discourse structures, but, since no teacher likely to buy the books would have heard of this, we called Book 2 Reading for Learning, and based the exercises on the processing of academic texts (reading). Book 3 we called Writing for Learning and the exercises were based on the composition of academic texts (writing).Reading test

For the reading tests I devised Cloze procedure tests, missing out every seventh word. If the learners understand the passage, they will be able to supply (some of) the missing words.

The texts used had to be tested for readability. We used the Fry readability test. This means counting the number of words, the length of words and length of sentences and reading off the result against a graph giving reading age.

The tests were carried out under exam conditions and lasted half an hour.

Writing test

 This was another half hour test in which the subjects were asked to do a continuous piece of writing on a choice of non-fiction topics. We impression marked the learners’ writing on a five-point scale.

GCSE results

The internal school tests were all positive, but were replaced as vindication of the course by the GCSE results in 1991.

The results are all given in Mason, Mason and Quayle 1992.