The current article tries to address the alignment issue between English textbook of teaching and English language testing method of Grade 12 in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). It aims at describing Grade 12 English ministerial test papers to find out what skills are targeted in the exam, and which language proficiency levels are measured in the exam according to the CEFR levels. The data was collected through Grade 12 English ministerial test documents (i.e., 2 test papers; each with 50 test items) of the 2023 to 2024 academic year of both first and second attempts. The article used quantitative research design and its data was analysed through items’ analysis by the researchers, and CEFR levels’ analysis by the AI-CEFR Analyser through assessing linguistic features and overall difficulties of the test items to estimate their CEFR levels, then after frequencies and percentages were implemented to interpret the results. The study findings revealed that, the English ministerial exam of Grade 12 cannot be considered as valid test, and the test fails to capture real language proficiency levels of the Grade 12 students. Also, the test cannot be considered as communicative English test, because it lacks the communicative requirements suggested by the CEFR framework. Finally, the study contributes to the ELT context in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and provides pedagogical implications for the Ministry of Education-KRI to start reforming its English language testing method and move towards implementing communicative language assessment for English language at the public schools of KRI.
Mahmud et al. (Thu,) studied this question.