Applicants must often demonstrate adequate English proficiency when applying to postsecondary institutions by taking an English language proficiency test, such as the TOEFL iBT, IELTS Academic, or Duolingo English Test (DET). Concordance tables aim to provide equivalent scores across multiple assessments, helping admissions officers to make fair…

Listening comprehension in English, as one of the most fundamental skills, has an essential role in the process of learning English. Mokken scale analysis (MSA) is a probabilistic-nonparametric approach to item response theory (IRT) which determines the one-dimensionality and scalability of test. Mokken scaling techniques are a useful tool for…

In response to the calls for making key stakeholders' perspectives relevant in the test validation process, the study discussed in this report sought test-taker feedback as part of collecting validity evidence and supporting the ongoing field testing efforts of the new "TOEFL ITP"® Speaking section. Specifically, I aimed to investigate…

The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test is a new English language proficiency test in the "TOEFL"® family of assessments. It measures foundational language skills and communication abilities in academic and general (daily life) contexts. The test covers the four language skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking and is intended…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard test is a tool for measuring the English language skills of students ages 11+ who learn English as an additional language. It is a paper-based multiple-choice test and measures proficiency in three sections: listening, form and meaning, and reading. To date, empirical evidence provides some support for the…

The present work seeks to establish a comparison between two different and distant evaluation tools applied to the Dominican student population in order to measure the efficiency of our educational system in the recent years, one of them measured the quality of Dominican education in three areas (the PISA Test), whereas the other tested the…

Administration of high-stakes language proficiency tests has been disrupted in many parts of the world as a result of the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic. Institutions that rely on test scores have been forced to adapt, and in many cases this means using scores from a different test, or a new online version of an existing test, that can be taken…

Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

This study investigated U.S. undergraduates' perceptions of non-native speakers' (NNS) speech which had received 100% proficiency scores on the TOEFL iBT test. Fifty-five U.S. undergraduates rated 20 speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability. The speech samples were also analyzed for acoustic fluency. Descriptively,…

Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) have received much interest within the field of language testing over the last decade due to their great potential to provide diagnostic feedback to all stakeholders and ultimately improve language teaching and learning. A large number of studies have demonstrated the application of CDMs on advanced large-scale…

The present study investigated the speaking module of TOEFL iBT with an emphasis on the dichotomy of independent and integrated tasks. The potential differences between the two speaking conditions were intended to be explored based on the oral performance elicited from a group of Iranian test takers. To collect the required data, a simulated…

In the realm of language proficiency assessments, the domain description inference and the extrapolation inference are key components of a validity argument. Biber et al.'s description of the lexicogrammatical features of the spoken and written registers in the T2K-SWAL corpus has served as support for the TOEFL iBT test's domain description and…

In the past 2 decades, there has been an increasing tendency to use scores from the "TOEFL iBT"® Speaking test for decisions regarding the certification of international graduate students as teaching assistants at North American universities. To obtain validity evidence in support of the usefulness of the speaking scores for this…

This study investigates the comparability of three parallel translation tasks selected from a College English Test Band-6 (CET-6) and explores the major linguistic features contributing to translation difficulty. Data obtained from the participants' subjective rating, eye-tracking, and performance evaluation were triangulated to measure the…