With the advent of new technologies, assessment research has adopted technology-based methods to investigate test validity. This study investigated the neurocognitive processes involved in an academic listening comprehension test, using a biometric technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Sixteen right-handed university…

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…

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…

The elicited imitation task (EIT), in which language learners listen to a series of spoken sentences and repeat each one verbatim, is a commonly used measure of language proficiency in second language acquisition research. The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test includes an EIT as a holistic measure of speaking proficiency, referred to as the…

One of the major issues in SLA is developing language tests that could produce good measures of implicit knowledge. This study examines the validity of an English Elicited Imitation (EI) test as a measure of L2 implicit grammatical knowledge. Forty freshman university students in Turkey took a set of language tests: an EI test, two storytelling…

As the most prestigious and popular standardized achievement test to certify examinees' proficiency of the English language at the national level, Foreign Language Examination (YDS) has been mostly taken by academic staff, undergraduate and graduate students, state employees, and military personnel for years in Turkey. The current study set out to…

This study investigates the relationship between performances on the speaking component of the TOEFL iBTTM with performances on academic oral assessment tasks. For the academic tasks, we recorded and transcribed the performances of five local and five high-achieving international undergraduate students on oral assessment tasks in core first-year…

In this article, we report on our development of a translanguaged French/English listening task as part of the revision of a test for professors in a bilingual Canadian university. The primary objective in revising the test was to more authentically represent the target language use domain, which regularly includes translanguaging. We describe the…

This study explored the relationships among language proficiency, two selected test-taker characteristics (i.e., topical knowledge and anxiety), and integrated speaking test performance. Data collection capitalized on three sets of instruments: three integrated tasks derived from TOEFL-iBT preparation materials, the state anxiety inventory created…

Assessment is an important aspect of medical education because it tests students' competence and motivates them to study. Various assessment methods, with and without images, are used in the study of anatomy. In this study, we investigated the use of extended matching questions (EMQs). To gain insight into the influence of images on the…

Speech acts are the major concern of interlanguage pragmatists. The present study aimed to 1) examine the reliability and validity of an interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) competence test on speech acts in a Chinese EFL context, and 2) investigate EFL learners' variations of ILP competence by language proficiency. Altogether 390 students participated…

This article examines the significance of information literacy self-assessments in higher education with a special focus on situational conditions increasing their explanatory power. First, it was hypothesised that self-assessments of information literacy correlate higher with factual information literacy if measured after the administration of…

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that requires finding the shortest path through a set of points ("cities") that returns to the starting point. Because humans provide heuristic near-optimal solutions to Euclidean versions of the problem, it has sometimes been used to investigate human visual…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

In the Information Communication Technology era teachers will have to wisely use the online environment in order to realize a new pedagogy. The penetration of the internet and collaborative online instruments to teaching and learning affect the quality of teaching. We have developed a digital indicator to evaluate the quality of the online tasks…